Only a clod
grand house no longer honestly maintained. Oh, that it could all be
swept away like the vision engendered out of some troubled slumber;
giving place to a suburban cottage and a life of decent toil!
“I have seen girls--well-bred, good-looking girls, trudging in the muddy
London streets, with music portfolios in their arms, while I have been
out shopping in my carriage,” she thought. “Oh, if I could only be like
one of these, and work for papa, and see him happy, smiling at me across
our little table, as I gave him his dinner, and not brooding as he does
now, hour after hour, hour after hour, in this grand drawing-room, with
the same settled look of trouble on his face!”
It was not only of late that Maude had watched her father anxiously and
sadly. Very often during the year just passed, and even in the year
preceding that, the girl had been alarmed by Lionel Hillary’s moody
looks and long gloomy reveries, out of which it was his wont to rouse
himself in a mechanical kind of way when strangers were present. But the
merchant always gave the same explanation of his sombre looks. Those
headaches, those constitutional headaches, which came upon him
constantly through the fatigue and worry of business--those terrible
headaches made an excuse for everything, and Maude’s fears about her
father related solely to his health. How should she understand the
dismal diagnosis of commercial disease? How should she imagine that
there was any limit to the fairy purse of Fortunatus--any chance of a
blight in Aladdin’s orchard of jewelled fruits?
The second dinner-bell rang, and there was no sign of the merchant’s
return. It had been a common thing lately for Lionel Hillary to keep his
cook in a fever of vexation over the hot plates and furnaces where the
viands for the diurnal banquet simmered and frizzled in their copper
receptacles. Maude felt no special alarm about her father. Why should he
hurry home to lengthen the long evening of brooding thought and care?
Why should she wish him home, when, out of all the depth of her love and
devotion, she could not conjure one word of comfort wherewith to greet
him?
She was thinking this when the door was opened suddenly by an eager
hand, and Mr. Hillary came into the room.
His daughter rose from the sofa, startled by the suddenness of his
entrance. It is a small action, that of opening a door, and entering a
room; but there was as great a change in Mr. Hillary’s performance of
it, as if twenty years had suddenly been lifted from his life.
“My darling!” he cried, taking his daughter in his arms, “it is you whom
I have to thank. It was your doing, was it not?”
“What, papa?”
“The money--the twenty thousand pounds.”
“Twenty thousand pounds!”
She thought the burning pain in her head had engendered some sudden
delirium. She could not believe that this was her father’s face, lighted
by a hopeful smile, such as she had not seen upon it during the last
three years.
“What twenty thousand pounds, papa?”
“The sum that has been placed to my credit to-day anonymously. The bank
people refused to tell me the name of my benefactor. I look to you,
Maude, to solve the mystery. There is only one man whom I know of, rich
enough to advance such a sum of money--young enough to do it in so
Utopian a manner. There is only one man, Maude, and his name is Francis
Tredethlyn. Tell me, my dear, have I guessed rightly?”
“You have, papa. Yes, I am sure you have. Poor fellow! and I was so
angry with him last night. It was very good of him to do this, papa.”
“Good of him!” cried the merchant--“good of him to lend twenty thousand
pounds, without a halfpennyworth of security! Upon my word, Maude, it
_is_ good; and I can assure you it’s a kind of goodness that is very
uncommon in the City.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII.
POOR FRANCIS.
From the second day of the New Year things went pleasantly enough in the
Twickenham household. How could Maude do otherwise than rejoice in the
salvation of her father’s honour--to say nothing of his commercial
prosperity--even though that salvation had been obtained by a great
humiliation on her own part? She would have borne that humiliation very
willingly, and would have freely acknowledged her obligation to Francis
Tredethlyn, could she have seen Julia Desmond reconciled to her lover.
But the separation between these two, which had arisen out of the scene
on New Year’s night, was a perpetual reproach to Maude Hillary.
She was not able to be quite happy, therefore, even though such a
terrible burden had been lifted from her,--even though she saw the dark
cloud swept away from her father’s face. Her girlish frivolity had
departed from her for ever on that terrible night in her father’s study
at Brighton; and there was a womanly softness, a pensive tenderness in
her manner now, that made her even more bewitching than of old. Her
affection for her father--always the ruling passion of her simple
mind--had been intensified by that fiery ordeal through which she had so
lately passed; and there was something very beautiful in the union which
now existed between the father and daughter. Mr. Hillary had been
surprised into confidences that made a new tie between himself and his
child. He could never again entirely withheld his secrets from that
tender friend and consoler. He could never again think of her as a
beautiful, frivolous creature, only intended to wear expensive dresses
and float about in graceful attitudes amongst the costly _bric-à-brac_
of a fashionable drawing-room. He had learned to trust his child; and
poor Maude applied herself diligently to the study of the customs and
dealings common in that mysterious region known to her as the City. She
tried to understand her father’s position--for she was tormented by a
feverish anxiety as to the repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty
thousand pounds; but the complications of an Australian merchant’s
trade, as affected by wars, and rumours of wars, by alterations in the
rate of discount and the price of Consols, were a little beyond Miss
Hillary’s comprehension, and she was fain to give up the attempt in
despair, and to accept any statement which her father cared to make to
her respecting the altered aspect of his affairs.
There was less company at the Cedars than usual during the bleak
early months of the year. Mr. Hillary worked very sedulously in the
City during this time, and did not care to fill his house with
frivolous young idlers or ponderous City-bred matrons and their
fashionably-educated daughters. The recklessness engendered by the
contemplation of inevitable ruin had given place to the careful
dealing of a man who has a difficult but not impossible task
allotted to him. You can scarcely expect the daughters of King
Danäus to labour very arduously in the filling of those buckets
which they _know_ will not hold water; but if the buckets are only
thin at the bottom, and _may_ possibly carry their contents safely
to the well, it is worth while to work conscientiously.
Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds had done wonders for Lionel
Hillary; but the dry-rot had been for a long time at work in that
stately ship of which the merchant was captain, and the successful
navigation of the vessel, amidst all the rocks and shoals and tempests
of the commercial ocean, was by no means an easy duty.
But Mr. Hillary was sanguine, and his daughter saw the new hopefulness
and brightness of his face, and was very nearly happy. She was not quite
happy, for Harcourt Lowther’s letters grew more despondent and
complaining by every mail. He reproached Maude Hillary for her
prosperity and her indifference; she must be indifferent, he argued, or
she would have succeeded ere this in obtaining her father’s consent to
her marriage with the penniless officer. “There are girls who will go
through fire and water for the man they love,” he wrote in an epistle
that was half filled with fierce reproaches. “I have seen the power of a
woman’s devotion; but then _that_ woman was only a poor simple creature,
and not the daughter of a millionaire. I cannot believe that you could
fail to influence your father, if you really cared to do so. If you
loved me, Maude, this business would have been settled long ago.”
Did she love him? That was a question which she had never set herself to
answer. Had they not engaged themselves to each other in the prettiest
and most sentimental fashion, like a modern Master of Ravenswood and
Lucy Ashton? Maude took the fact of her love for granted. All the
sweetest and tenderest dreams of her life were mingled with the memory
of Harcourt Lowther. He was so superior to all the other men who had
paid her their homage; and it may be that his contemptuous bearing
towards those other men had been a part of the fascination of his
manner. He had affected that modern Edgar Ravenswood tone--that elegant
Timon of Athens-ism--which is so intensely charming in the eyes of a
very young woman, however spurious it may be. And with all this, he had
been so devoted, so delightfully exacting, so deliciously jealous! Maude
looked back to the one sentimental period of her life, and saw Harcourt
Lowther’s image radiant in all the light of her own youthful fancies. So
the worshipper in a village chapel sees some poor painted wooden figure
of a saint glorified by the glitter of tapers, the brightness of flowers
and draperies and decorations. How was she to separate the lamps and the
flowers about the shrine from the image which they adorned? How was she
to discover the paltry nature of that clay out of which the graceful
figure was fashioned? Harcourt Lowther represented to her all that was
brightest and best in her early girlhood; and sitting alone, through
long and thoughtful hours, in the empty rooms at the Cedars, Maude
Hillary brooded very sadly upon the only love-story of her life.
She had ventured to speak of Harcourt to her father once since the
beginning of the year; but her timid pleading had been met by a cruel
repulse.
“Understand me at once and for ever, Maude,” Lionel Hillary said,
sternly; “such a marriage as that can never be. If you were the great
heiress people think you, I might gratify this whim, as I have gratified
other fancies, foolish and extravagant in their way. But the road I am
now treading is by no means too secure under my feet, and I cannot
afford to see my only child the wife of a penniless adventurer. I want
to see you happy, Maude, but not after a sentimental girl’s notion of
happiness. I know what all those pretty theories about a suburban
cottage and poverty come to when they are put into practice. I have seen
the slipshod maid-of-all-work, and the miserable dinners, and the
Kidderminster carpets, and stale bread and rank butter, that belong to
love in a cottage. And more than this, Maude, I know that Harcourt
Lowther is the very last man to ally himself to a dowerless wife.”
“Ah, how little you know him!” Maude murmured, softly. She thought she
knew her lover so well herself, and fancied him the most generous and
devoted of men because he had given her a few half-guinea bouquets,
purchased on credit from a confiding florist. “Ah, dear papa, how little
you know him! He is always reproaching me with my fortune, and lamenting
the gulf it has made between us. Let me tell him of your difficulties;
let me tell him that I am no longer a millionaire’s daughter, that I am
free to marry the man I love. Ah, let me tell him----”
“Not a word, Maude,” answered Lionel Hillary--“not a word to that man,
if you have any love or respect for your father. Remember that I have
trusted you with secrets that a man seldom confides to his daughter.”