Only a clod
“And your confidence shall be sacred, papa,” Miss Hillary replied,
submissively. And thus ended her intercession in favour of Harcourt
Lowther.
She was fain to be contented, however, remembering the great trouble
which had been so near her, and which a merciful hand had lifted away.
She was fain to remember, shudderingly, the feverish horror of that
night at Brighton, and to think gratefully of Francis Tredethlyn, to
whom she owed her father’s rescue. She was grateful to him; but she
could not put entirely away from her the sense of shame left by that
scene in the study, and Julia Desmond’s passionate reproaches. She could
not forget that it was for her sake Francis Tredethlyn had helped her
father, and that the burden of a great obligation must rest upon her
shoulders until that loan of twenty thousand pounds was repaid. Poor
Maude’s unbusiness-like mind entirely ignored any such thing as interest
for Mr. Tredethlyn’s money. She only thought of the loan itself, and the
question of its repayment was perpetually in her mind. Had she not been
the suppliant, at whose suit the money had been lent? and was she not in
a manner the actual debtor?
Things were much better in the City, her father told her; but upon two
or three occasions when she had ventured to hint her anxiety respecting
the early repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s money, the merchant’s
answers had filled her mind with vague disquietude. There was an
indifference in Mr. Hillary’s manner that alarmed Maude’s keen sense of
right and honour.
“Tredethlyn is too well off to want his money in any desperate hurry, my
dear,” he said; “he is not likely to become a very pressing creditor.”
The hedgerows about Isleworth and Twickenham were green, with their
earliest buds before Francis Tredethlyn came again to the Cedars. Mr.
Hillary had called upon the young man at his hotel several times before
he succeeded in seeing him, and had only with great difficulty wrung
from him an admission of the fact that he was the anonymous lender of
the twenty thousand pounds that had saved the merchant from ruin and
disgrace.
“My dear Tredethlyn, why should you insist upon any disguise?” Mr.
Hillary said, with a pleasant ease that not every man could have
maintained in such a position as that in which the merchant found
himself with regard to this simple-minded, country-bred Crœsus. “Is it
not enough to have been the most generous of men, without trying to
carry generosity to the verge of Quixotism? How can I doubt the identity
of my preserver? I know that Maude betrayed my necessities to you, under
the excitement of those unfortunate theatricals, and I know that loans
of twenty thousand pounds do _not_ drop from the skies. My dear fellow,
I am most heartily thankful to you for what you have done. It was a very
noble thing to do, an action that any man might be proud of doing. If I
had ever doubted your having good blood in your veins, your conduct in
this one matter would have settled my doubts. But I never did doubt it,
my dear Tredethlyn. I have recognized you from the first as a gentleman;
not by the right of an accidental thirty thousand a year, scraped out of
all manner of commercial gutters by a miserly uncle; but by virtue of
some of the best blood in the West of England.”
And then Mr. Hillary stretched out both his hands, and shook those of
Francis Tredethlyn in his vigorous grasp; and altogether the interview
could scarcely have been more entirely satisfactory had the merchant
written a cheque for the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. Indeed, to
Francis any immediate repayment of that money would have been a grievous
mortification. Was it not delightful to him to remember that he had been
of service to _her_ father? Was not the money advanced to the merchant a
kind of link between Maude and the man who loved her so dearly and so
hopelessly,--only a very sordid, earthy link; but better than none?
“I offended her very much that night,” Francis thought; “but perhaps she
will forgive me, and remember me kindly, when she thinks that I have
been useful to her father.” But when Mr. Hillary begged Francis to renew
his visits to Twickenham, the young man resisted those friendly
invitations as obstinately as if the Cedars had been the most obnoxious
place upon earth. He could not muster up courage to encounter Maude
Hillary after that scene in the little study. What if he had offended
too deeply for forgiveness? What if she slew him with a frozen glance
from her lovely eyes? Again and again in his lonely rides, emboldened by
the dusky twilight of the early spring evenings, he had ventured to
haunt the neighbourhood of the old brick-built mansion by the river; but
he could not bring himself to go any nearer to the shrine of his
divinity; and he made all manner of lame excuses in answer to Mr.
Hillary’s cordial invitations.
He was only a clod; only an uneducated rustic, newly cast upon a strange
world, open to all the pleasant snares which are laid for the
simple-minded possessor of thirty thousand a year. Heaven only knows the
perils and temptations into which some young men would have fallen under
similar circumstances. It is something in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour
that his worst mistake was to fall desperately in love with Maude
Hillary, and wear his horse’s shoes out in disconsolate rides about the
twilit lanes and roads in the neighbourhood of her dwelling-place.
And in the mean time Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon were supposed to be
busily employed in their search for the missing girl, who might or might
not have any right to another name than that of Susan Tredethlyn. Very
little came of the lawyers’ endeavours. Several advertisements had been
inserted in the “Times;” but it is to be feared that the lost and
missing advertised for in those columns are too often wanderers in a
weary region, far removed from that comfortable sphere of life in which
the morning papers are punctually delivered to enliven the
breakfast-table. No reply came to any of those mysteriously-worded
appeals to Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin which were concocted by the young
man and his legal advisers; and the image of the friendless girl grew
paler and fainter day by day in the mind of Maude Hillary’s adorer.
At last Fortune--who will generally do anything in the world for us, if
we have patience enough to wait her own time for doing it--brought about
the result which Francis Tredethlyn had so obstinately avoided, yet so
fondly desired. Lounging against the rails one brilliant April day at
the corner opposite Apsley House, Francis saw Maude Hillary’s carriage
drive into the Park.
Yes, there she was, with her sunny hair framed in spring blossoms and
white areophane. The young man seemed to behold the vision of an angel
in a Parisian bonnet, and half wondered if the folds of her white
burnous were not a pair of downy pinions floating away from her divine
shoulders. He grew very red and uncomfortable, and in another moment
would have yielded to the impulse that prompted him to seek refuge in
flight; but before he could do so, the carriage was close to the rails,
Maude Hillary had recognized him, and had told the coachman to stop.
She was not offended with him, then; she forgave him, and thought of him
kindly. His heart swelled with a rapture that was almost overpowering.
Ah! _this_ was love. How different from that placid sense of affection
with which he had regarded his cousin, Susy! how much more delicious!
how infinitely more painful!
“I have wanted so much to see you, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Maude said, after
shaking hands with her bewildered adorer; “why have you never been to
Twickenham?”
“I--I--don’t like--I thought you were angry with me,” stammered Francis,
very awkwardly. Ah, how sad it is that the presence of those we love
best, and in whose eyes we would most desire to appear at an advantage,
should entail upon us the annihilation of anything like ease or grace of
manner! Mr. Tredethlyn felt himself becoming purple and apoplectic,
under the influence of that seraphic creature, whose image had filled
his mind unceasingly for the last six months.
“Angry with you!” exclaimed Maude; “how should I be otherwise than
grateful to you, when I remember how good you have been to papa? Believe
me, Mr. Tredethlyn, I am not too proud to own the extent of our
obligation. I thank you most sincerely. You can never know how grateful
I am for the service you have rendered my dear father.”
She bent her head, and the spring-flowers in her bonnet were very near
him as she said this in a low, earnest voice. But in the next moment the
memory of that uncomfortable scene in the study flashed back upon her,
and she felt that she must always be more or less in a false position
with regard to Francis Tredethlyn. She made a little effort to set
herself right before she parted from him.
“You have seen Julia; you and she are reconciled, I hope. Mr.
Tredethlyn?”
“No; indeed, I have never heard from her since--since I left the Cedars.
Your papa told me that she----Oh, Miss Hillary, I think it was better
that we should part. I don’t think that we had either of us ever really
cared for each other. It was better that it should end as it did.”
“But I would give so much to find Julia, to hear where she is.”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head hopelessly. He had a vague idea that
he had not done his very uttermost in his search for his cousin Susan,
and he recoiled with terror from the idea of having to engage in a hunt
for Miss Desmond.
“Good-bye, Mr. Tredethlyn; I hope that all will come right, after all;
and I hope that you will believe I am grateful for your goodness to my
father.”
She held out her hand, and the Cornishman took it in his own with almost
as reverential a touch as if it had been some relic handed to him from
an altar. The carriage drove off immediately after this, and Francis saw
that seraphic bonnet with the spring-blossoms melt away and lose itself
among mundane bonnets. He lingered at the rails till the carriage came
back again, and still lingered after that, thinking that Miss Hillary’s
equipage would again return to Hyde-Park Corner; but after out-watching
all the loungers by the rails, and seeing the last of the carriages
leaving the Ladies’ Mile, he was fain to go home, resigned to the
obvious fact that Maude Hillary had left the Park by the Kensington
gates on her homeward route.
He went home, but not disconsolate. Had he not seen and spoken with that
divinity before whom he was the simplest worshipper who ever bowed
before any earthly shrine? Was he not assured of her forgiveness? nay,
even of her gratitude? Her gratitude--Maude Hillary’s gratitude, in
exchange for that vile dross which he had ever held so lightly. Money
was indeed good for something, if it could buy the rapture of that
little interview across the park-rail, in which Francis had played so
very poor a part. He went home, and carried Maude Hillary’s image with
him, and walked up and down his big sitting-room in the Covent Garden
Hotel, smoking a cigar and thinking of the woman he loved: he thought of
her quite as hopelessly as ever _Claude Melnotte_ could have thought of
_Pauline_ before _Beauseant’s_ diabolical suggestions had prompted him
to his treacherous wooing. He thought of her as innocently as a
schoolboy thinks of the stage fairy-queen in a Christmas pantomime, and
no ambitious or selfish dream had any abode in his mind; only when a
brief note reached him from Lionel Hillary, renewing the old
unceremonious invitation to the Cedars, poor Francis could no longer
resist the voice of the charmer, but was fain to pack his portmanteau
and drive down to the merchant’s office, whence Mr. Hillary was to
convey him in the mail phaeton to Twickenham. She was not angry with