Only a clod
necessary for him to travel in order to complete his education.’ I
couldn’t help laughing outright at this; for I thought if Mr. Lesley
wasn’t educated enough with all his books, and colleges, and crackjaw
languages, and such-like, he never would be educated. However, that was
no business of mine, and I kept my thoughts to myself. The time went by,
and still there was no news of Mr. Lesley coming home. He was always
going farther and farther north, Susan told me, when she spoke of him;
but she’d got to talk of him very little now, though I know she was
thinking of him and fretting about him all day and all night too: for
I’ve slept with her sometimes, and heard her moan in her sleep, and
speak his name, oh, so pitiful!”
“Poor girl! poor child! she was little more than a child!” murmured
Francis Tredethlyn.
“No more she was,” answered Miss Banks, with energy; “and him as
ill-treated her was a brute. I’m sure _I_ never thought much of him,
with his scornful, sneering ways, treating me and mother as if we were
so much dirt under his feet. As for that poor young thing, it was a
sorrowful day for her when she first set eyes upon him, fine gentleman
though he was, and above her in station, which she was always telling me
as a kind of excuse for his bad conduct. Well, sir, his letters got
fewer and fewer, and still Susan kept her troubles to herself, and only
said he was going farther north, and that he would he back before the
year was out. But the year passed, and he didn’t come back, and he’d
been away nearly ten months, and the baby was fourteen months old, when
a letter came for Susan, with St. Petersburg on the post-mark. I never
shall forget that day. It was dull, cold, March weather, with the wind
howling and moaning enough to give the liveliest person the dismals, and
Mrs. Lesley had been sitting by the window all the afternoon watching
for the postman. She was beginning to be nervous about her husband’s
health, she told me, as it was so long since she had heard from him. The
postman came at last, and I was down-stairs with mother when he came.
Mrs. Lesley ran into the passage, and took the letter herself. We heard
the parlour door shut, and then five minutes afterwards we heard a
scream and a heavy fall. Me and mother rushed up-stairs, and there was
poor Susan lying on the floor, with a letter clutched in her hand, and
the fingers clenched upon it so that neither me nor mother could loosen
them. We lifted her up and laid her on the sofa. She didn’t seem to have
fainted dead away, for she opened her eyes directly, and said, ‘Oh, why
didn’t you let me lie there till I died?’ And it was enough to pierce
the hardest heart to hear her. Mother began talking about the troubles
of the world, and asked her if there was bad news in the letter. ‘Oh,
yes!’ she cried; ‘cruel news--dreadful news!’ And then mother asked her,
Was Mr. Lesley dead? ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘dead to me! dead to me!’ Mother
fancied she meant he was really dead, and said she hoped Mrs. Lesley was
left comfortably provided for. You see, having seen a deal of trouble
herself, mother will look at things in that light. And then Susan cried
out that her trouble was one that we could never understand. I couldn’t
bear to leave her; but I got mother out of the way,--for her ways are
apt to be wearing to any one that’s in trouble,--and I stopped with
Susan all the evening. But she never spoke once; she only lay quite
quiet on the sofa, with her face turned to the wall; but I knew that she
was crying all the time; and when I took her the baby, thinking the
sight of him might comfort her, she only waved him away like with her
hand. I didn’t leave her till twelve o’clock that night; but she was
still lying on the sofa with her face turned to the wall. But just as I
was going away she stretched out her hand and said, ‘God bless you,
Jemima! it is very good of you to stop with me, but there is nothing
upon this wide earth that can give me any comfort now.’ I didn’t see her
the next morning, for she went out very early, and took the baby with
her, and she didn’t come back till late at night, and then she came back
without the baby. You might have knocked me down with a feather when I
opened the door to her and saw her come in without the child. ‘Oh,
Susan,’ I said, ‘what have you done with Robert?’--he’d been christened
Robert after his ’pa, and I’d stood godmother for him. Susan was as pale
as death, but she said very quietly, ‘I’ve put him out to nurse in the
country, Jemima. I was obliged to part from him, for I’m going away.’ I
thought all in a moment that she was going abroad to her husband, and
that her grief had been about parting with her child; but then I
remembered what she’d said the night before, about Mr. Lesley being dead
to her, and do what I would I couldn’t make it out. I’m sure I was as
much cut up at the thought of her going away as if she had been my own
sister.”
“I wish to Heaven she had stopped with you!” exclaimed Francis
Tredethlyn. “She had few friends, poor girl, and had no need to leave
any one who felt kindly towards her.”
“But she did leave us,” replied Miss Banks; “she paid mother every
farthing she owed her, and packed up her few little things. She would
make me take some of her pretty ribands and collars that had been bought
in Paris, and never worn out, for she didn’t care to dress herself smart
when Mr. Lesley was not at home; and then she sent for a cab, and went
away. I heard her tell the driver Shoreditch railway station, for I ran
out to the cab and kissed her the last thing, and begged her to come and
see us whenever she came back to London; and she promised that if she
lived, and things went well with her, she would. But from that day to
this we’ve never set eyes upon her.”
And this was the end of what Miss Banks had to tell. Francis
Tredethlyn’s thoughts wandered back to Mrs. Burfield; it was to her that
Susan Tredethlyn had gone in the March of 1851. So far the girl’s
history was complete; but the grand question still remained, Where was
she now to be found? A deserted wife, a friendless and perhaps penniless
mother; what had become of this lonely, inexperienced girl between the
March of 1851 and this present autumn of 1853?
“But surely you can give me some clue by which I may trace my cousin?”
said Francis, after a pause; “you can give me the address of some
friend, some intimate acquaintance of Mr. Lesley’s: he must have had
visitors while he lived here.”
Jemima shook her head decisively.
“Not one,” she answered: “except for bringing his brother home to dinner
once or twice, when he was first married, no mortal belonging to Mr.
Lesley ever darkened mother’s doors. Mother and me used to think it odd;
and of course there always are advantages in lodgers keeping much
company, which makes up for extra trouble; and the most audacious
lockers-up that ever were can’t go and lock-up under visitors’ very
noses. But we supposed, as Mr. Lesley’s marriage was a secret one, he
didn’t care to bring his friends home.”
“But his brother came?”
“Yes, only when they were first married; he never came after.”
“Did you hear the brother’s address?”
“Well, I have heard that it was in some of those law-places, the Temple,
or Gray’s Inn; but I never heard any nearer than that.”
Mr. Tredethlyn gave a despairing sigh; he thought of Mrs. Burfield’s
description of his cousin, pale and wan, waving her little hand out of
the carriage-window as she left Coltonslough, friendless and poor. Was
it not more than likely that she had only gone away to die, and that his
search for her would end at last in the discovery of a grave?
But might not the man, the husband who had deserted his innocent and
confiding wife, might not he be found and made to pay a heavy penalty
for his sins? Vengeance seems but a poor thing at the best, but it is at
least something; and Francis Tredethlyn felt a fierce desire for revenge
against the coldblooded destroyer of his cousin Susan’s happiness.
He asked Miss Banks many more questions; but she could tell him no more
than she had already told him. She had never heard anything of Mr.
Lesley’s family or antecedents, directly or indirectly. She knew he went
to college, but she never remembered hearing what college. She had
fancied sometimes that Mr. Lesley’s name was an assumed one; indeed, she
was sure it was; for when his brother had come to dine at Woolcote
Villas the first time, he had inquired for Mr. Robert by some other
name. Unfortunately, that other name had entirely escaped Miss Jemima’s
recollection.
“He caught himself up short,” she said, “as if he was vexed with himself
for having let slip that other name, and I never heard it again the
whole time Mr. and Mrs. Lesley were with us. I don’t think Susan knew
much more about her husband’s affairs than I did, for he always treated
her like a child; and even when he was kindest to her, he seemed to have
a high and mighty way with her, that would have kept any timid person
from asking questions.”
Francis thanked Miss Banks very heartily for the trouble she had taken
to enlighten him to the extent of her power, and then bade her good
afternoon.
“If you should meet with any one wanting apartments and board, either
partial or entire, you’ll perhaps be kind enough to bear mother in
mind,” the young lady said, as she escorted him to the door. He murmured
some polite assurance that he would neglect no opportunity of promoting
Mrs. Banks’s interest, and returned to the hansom, which had been
waiting for him during his prolonged interview with the good-natured
Jemima.
From Woolcote Villas he drove to the office of the Marylebone registrar,
and from that official he obtained an assurance that the marriage
between Robert Lesley and Susan Turner, on the 27th of February, 1849,
was, so far as his part of the business went, as legally binding as if
the ceremony had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury within
the solemn precincts of Westminster Abbey.
“If they chose to be married in false names, that was their business,”
said the registrar, “and they might find themselves bothered about it
by-and-by. But, except where there’s property, it isn’t often that a
person’s called upon to prove his marriage. I suppose, by your making
the inquiry, there _is_ property in this case?”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head.
“I know no more about that than you do,” he said.
“Well, I shan’t forget that business in a hurry,” said the registrar,
who was inclined to be communicative. “In the first place, the man was
one of your regular tip-top swells, and that’s a kind of party we don’t
often see here; and in the next place, he gave me a twenty-pound note,
which was the first windfall of that kind that ever dropped into my
pocket, and is more than likely to be the last.”
“Can you tell me what the man was like?”
“Tall and fair, with blue eyes and light hair; your regular swell: not
the heavy military swell,--more of a delicate womanish way with him; but
such as you may see by the dozen any afternoon in St. James’s Street or
Pall Mall.”
This description was no clearer than that given by Jemima Banks. Francis
could scarcely walk through a London street without meeting with some
man who might be described in the same words. He left the registrar’s
office, and went back to his hotel; and, absorbed in the arduous duties
of his toilet, thought alternately of lost Susan Tredethlyn, _alias_
Susan Lesley, and of beautiful Maude Hillary, who was so soon to be his
wife.
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CHAPTER XXIV.
FRANCIS TREDETHLYN’S DISINTERESTED ADVISER.
She was so soon to be his wife! Yes, October was near at hand. Already