Only a clod
Tredethlyn’s loveless betrothal! that dreary distance was growing wider
every day, now that Iphigenia knew the hour of sacrifice was drawing
near.
It had been one thing to think of Mr. Tredethlyn as a friend--a dear and
devoted friend, worthy to be regarded with an almost sisterly affection.
It was another thing to contemplate him as a future husband. All his
ignorance, his homely ways of speaking and thinking, his little
awkwardnesses and stupidities, his vacillating temperament in the matter
of spoons and forks at those elaborate Russian dinners,--all these
things pained Maude Hillary now as cruelly as they had galled Miss
Desmond’s proud spirit some six months before. And then to the faint
shivering pain of disgust was joined all the bitterness of contrast.
Never had Harcourt Lowther’s image seemed so near to this wayward girl
as it seemed now, when she was the promised wife of another man, and
tried most honestly to shut the memory of her old lover completely out
of her mind. Never had he been so near to her. His graces of manner, his
accomplishments, the light touch of his pointed fingers on the piano,
the deep organ-tone that he alone amongst amateurs could draw out of a
flute, the free outlines of his pencil, the transparency of his
water-colour sketches, the graphic humour of his pen-and-ink
caricatures; the airy wit, which never verged upon vulgarity; the fervid
eloquence, which never degenerated into rant; the trenchant satire,
which never sank to the vile level of personal spite: she thought of her
discarded lover: and all the showy attributes that had won her girlish
love arose before her in cruel contrast with the deficiencies of Francis
Tredethlyn.
Yet all this time she was very kind to her betrothed husband. It was not
in her to be scornfully indifferent to the man whom she regarded as her
father’s friend and benefactor. She was not a woman to sacrifice herself
with an ill grace. The silent warfare went on within her breast. She
struggled and suffered, but she had always the same kind, cold smile,
the same gentle words for the man whom she had promised to marry.
And in the meantime the hands went steadily round upon all the
clock-dials, and the inevitable hour drew very near. Busy milliners and
dressmakers, bootmakers and outfitters, came backwards and forwards from
Wigmore Street to the Cedars, and were busy and glad. Mr. Hillary’s
credit was unlimited, and it was almost as if a princess of the blood
royal had been about to marry. Francis Tredethlyn bought the lease of a
big black-looking house in a new neighbourhood near Hyde Park: and there
were negotiations pending for the purchase of an estate within a few
miles of Windsor.
August was melting into September. Already there were bright glimpses of
red and yellow here and there among the sombre green of the woodlands.
The wedding was to take place very early in October: the guests were
bidden, the dresses of the bridesmaids were chosen, and in the still
evening Iphigenia walked alone on the terrace. She was very seldom alone
at this hour; but to-night her father had taken Francis Tredethlyn to a
club-dinner, given by a bachelor stockbroker of some eminence in Mr.
Hillary’s circle. To-night Maude was alone; and leaning upon the broad
balustrade, with her elbow resting amongst the thick ivy that crept
along the stone, she looked down at the still water--the dark melancholy
water--and thought of her past life.
It seemed so far away from her now, left so entirely behind--all that
frivolous past. She seemed to have grown out of herself since the
knowledge of her father’s troubles had come upon her; and looking
backwards she saw a careless and happy creature, who bore no
relationship to this thoughtful woman, before whom all the future seemed
a blank and dreary country, unillumined by one glimpse of sunshine.
She turned away from the water presently, and walked slowly up and down
the long terrace. There seemed to be a melancholy influence in the
evening stillness, the dusky shadow lying upon every object, the distant
peal of bells floating across the river from some church where the
ringers were practising; even the voices of passing boatmen and the low
monotonous splash of oars took a pensive tone, in unison with the hour
and Maude Hillary’s sad remorseful thoughts.
She was near the end of the terrace, close to that ivy-grown old
summerhouse which had sheltered the patched and powdered beauties of
King George the Second’s Court, when she was startled by the sound of a
chain grating against stone-work, and rapid steps on the flight of
stairs leading from the terrace to the river. The young men who came to
the Cedars were very fond of making the journey by water: so there was
nothing strange in the sound of a step on the river stair. Maude turned
to meet the intruder with a sense of weariness and vexation. He would
not be likely to stay long, whoever he was; but the prospect of even ten
minutes’ idle conventional discourse jarred upon her present frame of
mind.
She turned to meet the unwelcome visitor with a languid sigh, and saw a
man hurrying towards her in the twilight; a man in whose figure and
dress there was a careless grace, an undefinable air of distinction,
which, in Maude Hillary’s eyes, stamped him as different from all the
rest of the world.
He came hurrying towards her. In a moment he was close to her, holding
out his arms, eager to take her to his breast. But she recoiled from
him, deadly white, and with her hands extended, motioning him back.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried; “don’t come near me. Ah, you don’t
know--you cannot have had my letter.”
“What letter?” cried Mr. Lowther, staring almost fiercely at the
shrinking girl. These sort of things so rapidly make themselves
understood. Harcourt Lowther saw at once that something was wrong. “What
letter?”
“My last; the letter in which I told you that----Ah, how you will hate
and despise me! But if you could know all, Harcourt, as you never can,
you might excuse--you might forgive----”
A torrent of sobs broke the sentence.
“Oh, I think I understand,” said Harcourt Lowther, very quietly. “You
have thrown me over, Miss Hillary.”
She held out her clasped hands towards him with an imploring gesture;
and then in broken sentences, in half-finished phrases, that were
rendered incoherent by her sobs, she recapitulated something of her
letter of explanation. Mr. Lowther’s face had blanched before this, and
his lower lip quivered now and then with a little spasmodic action; but
he listened very quietly to all Maude had to say.
“I ought never to have expected anything else,” he answered, when she
had finished her piteous attempt to explain and justify her conduct
without revealing her father’s commercial secrets. “I don’t know that I
ever _did_ expect anything else,” he went on very deliberately. “What
has a penniless younger son to do among the children of Mammon? How can
the earthen pot hope to sail down the stream with the big brazen
vessels, and escape wreck and ruin? Don’t let there be any scene between
us, Miss Hillary; I hate all domestic tragedy, and I think if my heart
were breaking--and men’s hearts _have_ been known to break--I could take
things quietly. You have grown tired of our long and apparently hopeless
engagement, and you have promised to marry somebody else. It is all
perfectly natural. May I know the name of my fortunate rival?”
“His name is Tredethlyn--Francis Tredethlyn.”
“A Cornishman,” added Harcourt Lowther,--“a fellow who has lately come
into a great fortune?”
“Yes. You know him, then?”
“Intimately. I congratulate you on your choice, Miss Hillary. Francis
Tredethlyn is a most excellent fellow. I have reason to speak well of
him, for he was my servant for a year and a half out yonder in Van
Diemen’s Land.”
“Your servant?”
“Yes. He was really the best of fellows; and in the art of brushing a
coat or cleaning a pair of riding-boots was positively unrivalled.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXII.
TAKING IT QUIETLY.
“If you could know all, Harcourt, as you never can, you might
excuse--you might forgive----”
Harcourt Lowther, very quick of apprehension always, especially so where
his own interests were concerned, had taken careful note of these broken
sentences uttered by Maude Hillary, and, rowing Londonwards in the
summer darkness, pondered on them long and deliberately, only arousing
himself now and then from his sombre reverie, in order to express his
profound contempt for some amateur waterman who was just saved from a
foul by the superior skill of the young officer.
What did it mean? That was the question which Mr. Lowther set himself to
answer.
“It means something more than the caprice of a shallow-hearted jilt,” he
thought, as he rested on his oars and lighted his cigar. “How pale she
grew at sight of me! That white, agonized look in her face was real
despair. ‘If I could know all!’ she said. All _what_? There’s a mystery
somewhere. Maude Hillary is the last woman in the world to throw over a
poor lover for the sake of a rich one. The sentimental girl, who was
ready to keep her engagement with me at the sacrifice of her father’s
fortune, would scarcely marry a clownish rustic for the sake of his
thirty thousand a year. Besides, these heiresses, who have never known
what it is to have a wish denied them, are the most romantic creatures
in creation, and cherish sublimely absurd ideas upon the sordid dross
question. No, I cannot think that Maude would be influenced by any
mercenary considerations--and yet how else----?”
The villas and villages on the river-banks flitted past him like phantom
habitations in the dim light. The flat shores of Battersea; the dingy
roofs and chimneys of crowded Chelsea and manufacturing Lambeth; the
bridges and barges; the low-lying prison, lurking like some crouching
beast upon the swampy ground, shifted by as the oars dipped in the quiet
water, while Harcourt Lowther’s light wherry sped homeward with the
tide. But all the length of his water-journey he could find no
satisfactory answer to that question about Maude Hillary; and when he
relinquished his boat to its rightful owner at a certain landing-place
in Westminster, he was still undecided as to the meaning of those broken
phrases which had dropped from the lips of the merchant’s daughter in
the first moment of surprise and emotion.
“I dare say it is only the old story after all,” he thought, as he
walked towards the Strand, in the purlieus of which he had taken up his
quarters. “Lionel Hillary, being as rich as Crœsus, is determined that
no poor man shall profit by his daughter’s fortune. Water runs to the
river, and Maude’s dowry will go to swell that old Cornish miser’s
savings. It’s only my usual luck. I am engaged to a beautiful woman with
a hundred thousand or so for a fortune, and I find a victorious rival in
the man who cleans my boots.”
But Mr. Lowther had not settled the question even yet. Lying awake and
feverishly restless in his lodging in Norfolk Street, Miss Hillary’s
pale face was still before him, the sound of her imploring tones was
perpetually in his ear.
“‘If I knew all, I might forgive, I might excuse!’ There must have been
some meaning in those words, some secret involved in them. Surely, if
her father had forced this marriage upon her, after the manner of some
tyrannical old parent in a stage-play,--surely, if that had been the
case, she would have candidly told me the truth; she would have pleaded
the best excuse a woman can have. There must be some secret reason for
this marriage, and I must be a consummate fool if I fail in getting to
the bottom of the mystery.”