Only a clod
guilty, and I accept your reproaches in all their bitterness. But when I
promised to be your true and faithful husband, I only made a promise
that I am still prepared to fulfil. You will at least do me the justice
to remember that I did not profess any warmer feeling than admiration
and esteem.”
“Your justification is only a new insult, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Julia
answered, coldly. “I wish you good night.”
Her passion had been something terrible in its suppressed vehemence some
moments before; but she was quite calm now. She swept towards the door
leading out into the corridor; but as she passed the merchant’s
daughter, she stopped, just long enough to utter one brief sentence
close in the young lady’s ear.
“You shall suffer for this, Miss Hillary,” she said,--
She left the room; but Maude followed her, crying “Julia! Julia!”
She hurried along the corridor and up the staircase, following closely
upon Miss Desmond; but when she reached that young lady’s room, the door
was shut in her face, and only one answer came to her almost piteous
pleadings for admission,--
“I have nothing to say to you, Miss Hillary. I only regret that I must
pass one more night in this house.”
So Maude was obliged to go away in despair, and, meeting her maid at the
door of her own room, was informed that Mr. Hillary had been inquiring
for her, “ever so many times,” the maid said; “and I’ve been looking for
you everywhere, Miss, to know when you’d have your dress changed.”
Yes, there was to be more changing of dresses before Maude’s work was
done. She resigned herself with a sigh to the hands of the young person
who waited upon her; and then went down-stairs, gorgeous in pink silk
and crape puffings, and with a crown of dewy rosebuds on her head, to
receive the compliments and congratulations of her father’s friends, and
to act her part in that social drama which was quite as difficult a
performance as the “Lady of Lyons.”
Francis Tredethlyn sat quite alone in the little dimly-lighted study at
the end of the long, rambling mansion, while Mr. Hillary’s guests
finished the evening with a little dancing, a great deal of flirting,
and a perpetual sipping of sparkling wines, in out-of-the-way corridors
and lobbies, where there were hothouse flowers and low chintz-covered
ottomans, and an air of loneliness conducive to flirtation. Francis
Tredethlyn sat alone, with Julia’s diamonds still lying at his feet, and
brooded over his position. He had outraged Maude, whom he adored. He had
injured Julia, to whom he was bound by every sentiment of honour and
good faith. No words can express the bitterness of his remorse as he sat
pondering upon what he had done. “False to my cousin Susan, false to
Julia Desmond,” he thought; “nothing but mischief has come to me since I
inherited that miserable money. I have no right to be amongst these
people. I never should have come to this house, where _her_ presence has
always seemed to turn my brain.”
He looked down at the diamonds lying on the carpet, and smiled bitterly
as he remembered how much money they represented,--more than had been
spent on Susan Tredethlyn in all the girl’s joyless life--ten times more
than would have restored the young man’s father to solvency and comfort,
that time when his uncle refused him the loan of two hundred pounds.
He stopped and gathered together the fallen jewels. There was a
writing-table near him, with pens, and paper, and sealing-wax, and all
necessary implements. He selected a large sheet of paper, and packed the
diamonds into a parcel. But before sealing the packet he wrote a few
lines on the margin of the paper,--
“DEAR MISS DESMOND,
“I beg you to retain the enclosed. They were given to you as an
evidence of my esteem and admiration, as well as of my gratitude
for your indulgent kindness to one so much beneath you as
myself. I implore you to forget and pardon what has happened
to-night. I am too ignorant of the world in which you live to
know what I ought to do; and I can only assure you that I am
ready to submit myself entirely to your discretion, and still
hold myself bound by every word I said in this room on the day
when you promised to be my wife.
“Yours sincerely,
“FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.”
No one but the servants knew when or how Mr. Tredethlyn left the Cedars
on that first night of the New Year; but a little before one o’clock the
next day a letter was delivered to Mr. Hillary--a letter from the
assistant-manager of a certain bank in the City, informing the merchant
that a sum of twenty thousand pounds had that morning been placed to his
credit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII.
SOMETHING LIKE FRIENDSHIP.
Maude Hillary did not rise very early after that New Year’s
entertainment at the Cedars; painful emotions, troubles, doubts, and
perplexities, that had been unknown to her through all her previous
lifetime, had crowded suddenly upon her within the last few weeks, and
it was scarcely strange if she well-nigh fainted under the burden. She
slept for some hours on that first night of the year,--slept the
feverish, heavy slumber that waits upon trouble of mind and exhaustion
of body. The winter sun shone with a chill brightness between the
rose-coloured draperies of her window when she awoke from a painful
dream to a dim sense of actual trouble that was still more painful. She
remembered the scene of the previous night, her own desperate appeal for
help, Francis Tredethlyn’s avowal, and Julia’s indignation. She
remembered all this with a burning sense of shame, and with a tender and
pitying regret for Julia’s wrongs.
“And he did not love her!” she thought, “when I fancied they were so
happy and united, so much what lovers ought to be; it was all false,
after all, and he had deceived her. But why? What motive could he have
for doing her so great a wrong?”
Miss Hillary pondered upon this mystery while she dressed,--unaided this
morning, for she did not care to endure her maid’s sympathetic remarks
upon her pale face and heavy eyes; unaided, for how soon that pretty
Twickenham paradise, with all its dependencies, might pass away from
her, unsubstantial as the fairy palace in which Princess Balroubadour
floated away to Africa! Maude put on her plainest morning dress, and
went straight to Julia’s room, intending to make her peace with that
young lady, at any cost of self-humiliation. No base thought of Julia’s
obligations, no remembrance of the favours that had been heaped upon the
Irish girl in that hospitable habitation, had any place in Maude
Hillary’s mind. She thought of her friend as tenderly as she might have
thought of an only sister, and she remembered nothing except the great
wrong that had been done to Julia by the defection of her lover. The
breach between them was not to be narrowed. When Maude entered her
friend’s bedroom, she only found an empty and desolate-looking
apartment, in which open wardrobes and drawers, and a dressing-table,
cleared of all its pretty frivolities, bore witness to the angry Julia’s
departure.
Miss Hillary’s maid came running along the corridor, while her mistress
stood amazed in Miss Desmond’s deserted chamber.
“Oh, Miss,” cried the girl, “to think as you should get up and dress
yourself without a bit of help, while I’ve been waiting and listening
for the bell these last two hours! Miss Desmond, she have gone, Miss,
above an hour ago, and have took all her boxes in a fly to the station,
but wouldn’t have none of the servants to go with her; and Oh, Miss, she
looked as white as that toilet-cover.”
That was all Maude could hear of her sometime friend’s abrupt departure
from that pleasant dwelling-place, in which she had enjoyed such a
luxurious home. This was all that the servants could tell their young
mistress about the splendid Julia; but in the study, where the scene of
the previous night had been enacted, Maude found a letter directed to
herself, in Miss Desmond’s handwriting. It was a very brief missive;
almost such a one as an English Elizabeth, or a Russian Catherine, might
have written.
“For your father’s hospitality,” wrote Miss Desmond, “I shall always
remain grateful, and shall be sorry to hear of any evil that may befall
him. The debt I owe to _you_ I shall also know how to remember, and
shall wait the time and opportunity for its repayment.--J. D.”
Maude sat for some time musing sorrowfully upon this oracular epistle.
She was not in any wise terrified by her friend’s threats; she was only
sorry for Julia’s disappointment.
“She must have loved Francis Tredethlyn very dearly,” Miss Hillary
thought, sorrowfully, “or she would never feel his conduct so deeply.
And yet I have often fancied that she spoke of him coldly, almost
contemptuously.”
Poor Maude Hillary’s lessons in the mysteries of every-day life had only
just begun; she had yet to learn that there are other disappointments
than those which wait upon true love, other pains and sorrows than those
which have their root in the heart; and that there are such things as
marrying and giving in marriage for the love of thirty thousand a year.
She spent a weary day in the pleasant drawing-room, where the red glow
of a great fire illuminated as much prettiness in the way of china, and
Parian, and bronze, and ormolu, and enamel, as would have stocked a
_bric-à-brac_ shop in Wardour Street. She spent a tiresome day, that
seemed interminably long, lying on a low sofa near the fire, thinking of
her father’s troubles and Julia’s desertion. She thought also of that
cruel scene, in which she had seemed to play so contemptible a part.
What bitter humiliation it was to look back upon, now that the mad
impulse of the moment, the desperate courage that had made her snatch at
_any_ chance of help for her father, had altogether passed away! How
mean and pitiful the whole business seemed now to her calmer judgment,
looked upon in the cold light of common, sense! A borrower, a beggar
almost, a miserable suppliant to her friend’s affianced husband. What
wonder that Francis Tredethlyn had basely taken advantage of that false
position, to avow a passion whose least expression was an insult to her
on the lips of Julia Desmond’s lover? And then what wasted humiliation,
what unnecessary shame; for had not she turned upon him and upbraided
him in the next moment, forgetful of her father’s desperate need!
Such thoughts as these were scarcely pleasant company all through that
brief January day, which seemed so long to Maude Hillary. The slow hours
crept on, and she still lay tossing restlessly on the sofa, which
offered all that upholstery can offer for the consolation of a troubled
mind. A servant brought lamps, and crept from window to window, drawing
the curtains as stealthily as a burglar would have cut a square out of
the iron door of Mr. Hillary’s plate-room. The first dinner-bell rang
out in the old-fashioned cupola upon the roof, and informed all
Twickenham that it was time for the people at the Cedars to array
themselves for the evening meal: but Maude still lay upon the sofa,
hiding her flushed face in the pillows, and trying to quiet the
throbbing in her burning head. What did it matter? The poor
inexperienced girl broke down all at once in her social comedy. She
could act the wearisome play no longer; she wanted to give up all her
share in this world, and to go to bed and lie there quietly until she
died. All the common business of life seemed unutterably loathsome to
her,--the dressing and dining, the simpering small-talk, the finery of a