Only a clod
“Tell them that you are Francis Tredethlyn, nephew of Oliver Tredethlyn,
and that you can bring forward plenty of witnesses to prove your
identity, and so on, as soon as you can get back to England. I don’t
suppose they’ll let you have your legacy till they see you. Ask them to
tell you what the amount is, at any rate.”
Mr. Lowther did not confine himself to giving his valet these hints upon
the composition of his letter; he was good enough to stand behind the
young man’s chair, and look over his shoulder as he wrote; but as
Francis Tredethlyn’s penmanship was not of a very rapid order, the
ensign’s eyes soon wandered from the page, and straying to an open
division of the desk, lighted on something that looked like a
water-coloured sketch, covered with silver paper.
“Why, you sly dog,” he cried with a laugh, “you’ve got a woman’s picture
in your desk!”
Francis Tredethlyn blushed and looked very sheepish as he took the
little water-coloured sketch out of its silver-paper envelope and handed
it submissively to his master.
“It’s my cousin Susan’s portrait, sir,” he said; “it was taken by a
travelling artist, who came down our way one summer. It isn’t much of a
likeness, but it pleases me to look at it sometimes, for I can fill up
all that’s wanting in the face out of my own mind, and see my cousin
smiling at me, as if I was at home again.”
Mr. Lowther stood behind his servant’s chair looking at the portrait,
while the soldier went on writing. It was not the work of a very
brilliant artist; there was none of those deliciously careless touches,
none of that transparent lightness, which a clever painter’s
manipulation would have displayed. It was a stiff, laborious little
portrait of a girl with hazel brown eyes and smooth banded brown hair,
and an innocent childish mouth, rosy and fresh and smiling as a summer’s
morning in the country. It was only the picture of a country girl, who
seemed to have looked shyly at the artist as he painted her.
“So that’s your cousin Susy,” said Mr. Lowther, laying the picture down
upon the table by Tredethlyn’s elbow. “I shan’t stop while you address
your letter, and I don’t want any thing more, so you can go to bed at
once if you like. Good night.”
The ensign took a candle from a little side-table as he spoke, lighted
it at the lamp above Tredethlyn’s head, and went out of the room.
Francis finished his letter, and placed it on the mantelpiece, where
some letters of his master’s were lying ready for the next day’s mail.
He did not go to bed at once, though it was late, and he was free to do
so, but sat for some time with his cousin Susan Tredethlyn’s portrait in
his hand, looking at the girlish face, and thinking of the changes that
had come to pass in his old home.
“The old chap was hard and stern with her, and her life was a dull one,
poor little girl,” thought the soldier; “and she’ll have a fine fortune,
I suppose, now he’s gone; but somehow I don’t like to think of her left
lonely in the world; she’s too young and too pretty, and too innocent
for that. Innocent! why, bless her poor tender little heart, I don’t
think she knows there’s such a thing as wickedness upon this earth.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV.
TREDETHLYN’S LUCK.
Francis Tredethlyn had to wait a very long time before there could be
any possibility of a letter from the Gray’s Inn solicitors, but he
endured the delay with perfect tranquillity of mind; and if either of
the two men seemed anxious for the arrival of the letter, that man was
Harcourt Lowther, and not Francis Tredethlyn. The ensign had a trick of
alluding to his servant’s good fortune whenever things went especially
ill with himself.
“Here am I without a friend in the world to lend me a five-pound note,”
he would remark, impatiently, “and there are you with a chance of a nice
little legacy from that old uncle of yours. I shouldn’t wonder if you
stand in for four or five hundred at the least.”
“I don’t think it, sir,” the valet always answered, coolly. “I’ve heard
our neighbours say, that what with farming, what with mining, and
dabbling a good bit with funds and railway shares, and such-like, my
uncle must be as rich as a Jew; but for all that, I don’t look to be
much better off for any thing that he’ll have left me. I suppose he’s
left every thing to my cousin Susan, seeing that he had neither kith nor
kin except her and me. But somehow or other I can’t imagine his parting
with his money to any one, even after his death. I almost fancy that
he’d rather have tied it up, if he could, so that the interest upon it
would go on accumulating for ever and ever, thinking as he might
perhaps, being old and eccentric, that he’d have a kind of satisfaction,
even in his grave, from knowing that the money was going on getting more
and more, instead of being spent or squandered.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not make this remark in any spirit of ill-nature;
he spoke like a man who states a plain fact.
“I dare say he was a regular old curmudgeon,” Mr. Lowther answered, “but
he must leave his money to some one, and the fact of these lawyers
advertising for you is ample proof that he must have left some of it to
you.”
Such a conversation as this occurred pretty frequently during the long
interval in which Francis Tredethlyn waited for the answer to his
letter. Sometimes, when Harcourt Lowther was in a very bad temper, he
would accuse his attendant of having grown proud and insolent and lazy,
since the advent of that _Times_ newspaper, which the ensign had
borrowed from Mr. Corbett; but every one of the accusations was as
groundless as many other of the officer’s complaints against people and
things in general. There was no change in Francis Tredethlyn: he did his
work cheerfully and well, obeyed orders in a frank, manly spirit, and
behaved himself altogether in a most exemplary manner.
The time when a letter from England might be expected came round at
last; but Francis Tredethlyn evinced no anxiety for the arrival of the
solicitors’ epistle. A long season of drought had given way before a
sudden downfall of rain, and Harcourt Lowther, who had planned a couple
of days’ kangaroo hunting, and had made all necessary arrangements for
the performance of his duties by a good-natured and efficient
colour-sergeant, found himself a prisoner in his cottage at Port Arthur,
with nothing to do but wait for a change in the weather.
It was very tiresome. The accomplished, light-hearted Harcourt Lowther,
who could take life so pleasantly in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia or
Belgravia, to whom a summer afternoon amongst a group of fashionable
gossips in the smoking-room of his favourite club was only too short,
found this terrible Tasmanian day intolerably long. He had tried every
available way of getting rid of his time. He had sketched a little, and
read a little, and played the flute a little, and smoked a great deal,
and had relieved the oppression of his spirits by an incalculable number
of yawns, and a little occasional bad language. And now, having
exhausted all these resources, he stood with his head leaning listlessly
against the roughly finished sash of the window, watching the convict
labourers at work under the heavy rain. He derived some faint ray of
comfort from the signs of those two men. At any rate, there were some
people in the world worse off than himself,--unlucky wretches who were
obliged to work in wet weather, and wear a hideous dress, and eat coarse
unpalatable food, or food that appeared abominably coarse and
unpalatable in the eyes of Mr. Harcourt Lowther, who had been known upon
occasion to turn up his nose at the culinary masterpieces of Soyer and
Francatelli.
“Why don’t they kill themselves?” muttered the ensign; “they could drive
rusty nails into their veins, and make an end of themselves somehow.
There are plenty of poisonous things in my garden that they might eat,
and make a finish of their lives that way; but they don’t. They go on
day after day drudging and toiling, and enduring their lives, somehow or
other. I suppose they hope to get away some day. How ever should I bear
my life if I didn’t hope to get away--if I didn’t hope it would come to
an end pretty soon?”
Mr. Lowther, having exhausted the pleasure to be derived from a
contemplation of the convicts, took to pacing up and down the two rooms;
in the inner of which Francis Tredethlyn was busy cleaning his master’s
guns.
Walking backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and passing
the valet every time, Harcourt Lowther was fain to talk to him; rather
for the pleasure and relief of hearing his own voice, than from any
desire to be friendly towards his vassal.
“No letter yet, Tredethlyn?” he said.
“No, sir; but it may come any day.”
“And you wait for it as quietly as if a legacy, more or less, was
nothing to you. I suppose if they send you a remittance, you’ll be
wanting to buy your discharge, and leave this place; and I shall have to
get another servant,--some awkward, ignorant boor, perhaps?”
“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty as good as me, I dare say,
among our fellows. Other folks may have been brought up respectably, and
taken to soldiering, like me. And as for buying my discharge, I don’t
say but I should be glad to do that, if those lawyer people gave me the
chance. I should be glad to get back to England and see my little cousin
Susy. I always call her little Susy, because I can’t help thinking of
her as she was when I remember her first, when she and I were boy and
girl sweethearts together. I’ve thought of her a deal since I got the
news of her father’s death, and I feel anxious about her, somehow or
other, when I fancy her left alone among strangers.”
Harcourt Lowther, always walking backwards and forwards between the two
rooms, was in the sitting-room when his servant said this. He stopped to
look out of the window again, and there seemed to be a kind of dismal
fascination for him in the convicts, towards whom his eyes wandered in a
moody, absent-minded stare.
“And where do you expect to find her--your cousin, I mean--when you do
go back to England?” he asked presently.
“At the old farm, sir, to be sure. Where should I find her but there?
Poor little soul! she’s never known any other home but that, and isn’t
likely to leave it in a hurry of her own free will.”
“Humph!” muttered the officer, “there’s no calculating upon the changes
that take place in this world. I never expect to find any thing as I
left it when I return to a place or people that I’ve been absent from
for any length of time. I expect to find plenty of changes when I get
back to the civilised world again. Do you suppose the people _there_ can
afford to waste their time thinking of wretched exiles _here_? Life with
them is utterly different from what it is with us. When I left England,
I was engaged to a beautiful girl with fifty thousand pounds or so for
her fortune,--a girl who would have married me, and given me a grand
start in life, if it hadn’t been for her father; but do you think I
expect to find her in the same mind when I go back? Do you think two
years’ absence won’t act as a sponge, and wipe _my_ image out of her
thoughts? What has a beautiful, frivolous creature like that to do with
constancy? Every man who looks at her falls over head and ears in love
with her. She is fed upon flattery and adulation. Is it probable, or
natural, or even possible that she will remember _me_?”
It was not likely that Mr. Lowther would ask this question of his valet.
He asked it of himself, rather, in a peevish and complaining spirit, and
seemed to find a dismal comfort in harping on his wrongs and his
miseries.