Only a clod
January, papa,” she said.
And then, as Lionel Hillary was about to leave his daughter’s room, she
placed herself suddenly between him and the door, and turned the key in
the lock. He looked at her, surprised and perplexed.
“Maude!”
“Dearest father, you have trusted me, and you have exacted a promise
from me,” said Miss Hillary, with a quiet calmness that was more
impressive than any vehemence of manner; “and now I want you to give me
a promise, a very solemn promise, my own dear father.”
She put her hand upon his shoulder and kissed him once more, clinging to
him fondly, looking tenderly upward to his pale careworn face. Then she
took a bunch of keys from her pocket and held them out before him.
“You remember those keys, papa; I am going to return them to you; but I
want you to kneel down with me here, now, when all that feverish
excitement of last night has passed away; I want you to promise me, as
you hope for mercy and happiness in a better world when this life is all
gone by and done with,--I want you to promise me that you will never
again under any circumstances, in any hour of trial or temptation, think
of that dreadful alternative of which you thought last night. Oh, papa!
remember it is such a terrible sin even to think of it; for we can never
do so until we have ceased to trust in God.”
The simple words went straight to Lionel Hillary’s heart--that
world-weary heart, in which there was but this one tender quality of
paternal love still left. No subtle arguments of theologian or
philosopher could have so deeply influenced him as his daughter’s gentle
pleading. He knelt by her side, close to a little table, on which an
open Testament was lying, and pressing his lips upon the sacred page
swore that he would never again contemplate the sin which he had so
nearly committed only a few hours before.
“It is a coward’s remedy at the best,” he said presently; and then he
took his daughter in his arms and looked down at her tearful face with a
mist before his own eyes, which made that bright young beauty seem
blotted and dim. “My Maude, my darling, surely Heaven must have created
you to be my guardian angel. I have not been a good man; I have been too
much of a speculator for the last few years,--a reckless speculator,
perhaps; but when the demon of commercial hazard had his grip strongest
upon me, your image was always in my mind. I wanted to leave you rich,
secure from all the troubles of this world. I was a poor man in my young
days, Maude; and perhaps the bitterness of that early time may have
taught me to set too high a value upon wealth. Fortune came to me
afterwards, almost as wonderfully as it comes to a prince in a fairy
tale; and some recklessness of spirit may have been engendered in me by
my own successes and by the times in which I have lived.”
“But, dear papa, you need not fear poverty for my sake,” said Maude;
“only trust in me, and when the time comes you shall find me ready to
face it. My life has been very pleasant--too pleasant, I dare say,--I
have always felt that it was so when the thought has come to me of all
the people who suffer in this world. But you know how the princess in
the fairy tale, who has never known a sorrow, goes out all at once into
the great forest, more helpless and lonely than the poorest woodman’s
daughter, and yet no harm ever comes to the princess, papa. If it will
only please Heaven to spare your good name, poverty will have no sting
for me; and if disgrace _should_ come, I will bear it for your sake,--I
will bear it without a murmur for your sake, papa.”
She broke down just a little as she said this; she could not speak quite
calmly of that most terrible loss of all--the loss of her father’s
commercial honour. She remembered, very dimly, long prosy discussions
that she had heard at Mr. Hillary’s dinner-table, about men who had
failed, and who had failed through some dishonesty or recklessness of
their own, and whose downfall had involved the hard-won fortunes of
others, making a vast circle of ruin, spreading as the watery circle
spreads when you drop a pebble into a tideless lake.
From this time it almost seemed as if a new life began for Maude
Hillary. No more careless idling over new music, no more eager
commencements of expensive fancy-work that was never to be finished!
After Miss Hillary’s return to the Cedars, anyone taking the trouble to
watch her closely might have perceived a wonderful alteration in her
conduct--a change that was almost a transformation in her very nature.
When she opened her piano now, it was for no idle trifling with
fashionable difficulties, no coquetting with shakes, and skipping of
arpeggios. She practised steadily, and for hours together. Might not the
time be very near at hand in which she would be called upon to gird on
her armour, and join the ranks of the bread-winners? She thought of
herself in a dingy London street, somewhere in the dreary region between
Holborn and the New Road--the region which was once a fair expanse of
pleasant meadow-land. She thought of herself toiling as so many women
toiled, leading the same dull life from day to day; and her courage did
not fail her even before that dismal picture. It was not likely that
this change in Maude Hillary could escape the notice of so observant a
young lady as Miss Desmond. Julia saw and wondered, but she was far from
guessing the real cause of Maude’s unusual gravity.
“I suppose she is making herself unhappy about Harcourt Lowther,”
thought Miss Desmond. “These fortunate people always contrive to find
_one_ crumpled leaf in their beds of roses. She is making herself
miserable about that handsome, worthless soldier, and she thinks herself
hardly used because she cannot play at love in a cottage, with a rich
mercantile father to pay the expenses of the idyllic _ménage_.”
This was how Julia Desmond accounted for Maude’s long intervals of
absent brooding, and that melancholy shadow which settled on her face
whenever she fancied herself unnoticed, and for a while relaxed the
heroic effort with which she tried to keep her promise, and guard her
father’s secret. It was a very hard struggle. All the young idlers, the
government clerks, the briefless but literary barristers, the rising
artists who had narrowly escaped making palpable hits at the Royal
Academy, or at a temple of art which they irreverently alluded to as the
“British Inst,” all the accustomed Twickenham loungers flocked down to
the Cedars to keep their Christmas holidays in the house of a gentleman
whom they regarded as a sort of commercial Midas--a Moorgate Street
Fortunatus, from whose inexhaustible coffers flowed the golden waters of
perpetual prosperity: and Maude received all the old incense, and was
fain to smile something like the old smiles upon her worshippers; while
her heart ached with an unceasing pain, and a hidden dread that was like
a palpable burden weighed for ever on her breast.
“Oh, if they knew--if they only knew!” she thought. “They court me
because they think I am rich, perhaps; but if they only knew what an
imposture all this splendour is--these lights and flowers, and grapes
and pines, and Sèvres china and Venetian glass, and all this long parade
of dinner! if they knew that poverty and disgrace may come to us before
the new year has well begun!” Sometimes, in her utter weariness of
spirit, sometimes when the social comedy seemed almost too hard to act,
Miss Hillary felt suddenly tempted to turn round upon her admirers, and
cry to them,--
“Why do you torment me with your hackneyed compliments? I am _not_ the
daughter of a millionaire; my father is only an imprudent speculator,
who is hovering on the verge of a black abyss of bankruptcy and ruin. Go
and offer your worship in some solvent temple, and leave me alone with
my father and his sorrows.”
This, or something akin to this, Miss Hillary was at times sorely
tempted to utter. But she kept her promise. She had promised that no
word or action of hers should betray the rottenness of her father’s
position, and she kept a close watch upon herself. Her adorers--who were
by no means so mercenary as she thought them--perceived that something
was amiss with their goddess; but were far from associating anything so
vulgar as the state of the money-market with the lessened lustre of her
smiles.
“She’s engaged to some fellow in the army, and her father won’t let her
marry him, and the fellow writes her worrying letters; Miss Desmond told
me as much,” the loungers said one to another, when confiding in each
other about Miss Hillary.
The brilliant Julia had taken care to let Maude’s admirers know that her
heart had long been bestowed upon a remote object; but she did not go so
far as to reveal the name of Miss Hillary’s chosen lover; and Francis
Tredethlyn had no suspicion that Maude Hillary and the beautiful heiress
of whom his master had so often spoken were one and the same person. He
knew nothing of this; he only knew that Maude seemed as remote from his
sphere as the distant stars that shone coldly upon him out of a
steel-blue winter sky when he looked from his window at the Cedars. He
spent his Christmas at the Cedars; for Mr. Hillary had been specially
cordial and hospitable to him of late, and had resumed all his old
graciousness of manner to Julia.
And the private theatricals, the elegant drawing-room exhibition of
amateur histrionics, which Maude had planned so merrily in the autumn,
were to take place on the first night of the new year--now, when the
poor girl’s heart was sinking under the dull pain of that perpetual
burden, that dreary terror of the disgrace which might be so near.
She had told her father that a miracle might be wrought before the 10th
of January. Of what had she thought or dreamed when she held out that
hope? What daring fancy had been engendered out of the excitement of the
moment? There are times when a woman feels capable of becoming a social
Joan of Arc, a bloodless Charlotte Corday; but then the enthusiasm, the
exaltation of the moment is so apt to pass _with_ the moment. There had
been a vague but desperate intention lurking in Maude Hillary’s mind
when she had encouraged her father by those hopeful speeches; but the
days were creeping past, the new year was close at hand, and nothing had
been done. Nothing had been done; and now Miss Hillary was tormented all
day long about these wonderful private theatricals, which were to
surpass every drawing-room performance since the days when the unhappy
daughter of the Caesars played a _soubrette_ for the delight of that
taciturn king and grandfather-in-law who did not like to laugh.
All arrangements for the grand entertainment had been made before Mr.
Hillary’s household removed to Brighton. The play had been selected, the
characters allotted to the individuals who were supposed, or who
supposed themselves, to be most fitted to play them; but not without as
much shuffling and changing as the kings and queens undergo in a game of
cards. The drama finally chosen was the “Lady of Lyons,” selected, no
doubt, on that grand principle in accordance with which all amateurs go
to work, _i. e._ because it is a play which specially requires
accomplished actors in every one of its characters. Of course Maude was
to be the _Pauline_. Was she not sole daughter and heiress of the master
of the house, at whose expense all the business was to take place? If
she had been red-haired, or hump-backed, or lame, the amateurs could
scarcely have done otherwise than choose her as the representative of
the lovely _Mademoiselle Deschappelles_. But as she was one of the
fairest daughters ever spoiled by a wealthy merchant, she was really
created for the part, as it seemed; and she had only to order her