Only a clod
the woods and hills beyond the Star and Garter were bright with autumnal
tints of vivid orange and glowing crimson. The milliners and
dressmakers, the outfitters and bootmakers, were perpetually appearing
in the hall and on the staircases at the Cedars. Wicker baskets covered
with oilskin seemed continually passing in and put of Mr. Hillary’s
abode, and Maude could rarely enjoy a quiet half-hour undisturbed by a
mysterious summons, entreating her to inspect or try on some garment
newly brought home by a “young person” from town. Harcourt Lowther made
himself quite at home both at the Cedars and at Francis Tredethlyn’s
chambers during this period of preparation. Francis took very kindly to
his old master in his new capacity of friend and mentor. The habits of
the past made a link between them. The old half-friendly,
half-supercilious familiarity which had characterized Harcourt Lowther’s
treatment of his servant melted now into a playful and almost caressing
friendliness. Mr. Lowther was a thoroughly selfish man, and he found
himself called upon in this instance to sacrifice his pride in the cause
of his interest. He affected a hearty interest in Francis Tredethlyn’s
affairs, and contrived somehow, by a series of manœuvres, so subtle as
to be imperceptible, to install himself in the post of chief adviser to
the inexperienced young Cornishman. Mr. Lowther was an idle man, a very
clever man, too versatile for greatness, or even for any celebrity
beyond that species of drawing-room reputation, which women are able to
bestow on the men who are not too noble to waste a lifetime in small
accomplishments and shallow courtesies. He was very clever, very idle,
very much inclined to quarrel with the decrees of Providence; and in
Francis Tredethlyn he saw the possessor of the two things he himself
most ardently desired--a great fortune, and Maude Hillary for a wife.
But he was true to his resolution to take matters quietly; and he
assisted in the preparations for the wedding with as much outward show
of pleasure as if he had been a match-making mother rejoicing in the
happy disposal of a whole brood of daughters. The big mansion in the new
district of palatial streets and squares lying between Kensington and
Brompton was fitted and furnished under Mr. Lowther’s superintendence.
He had meetings with architects, gilders, decorators, and upholsterers;
and, with only an occasional reference to Francis, gave his orders as
freely as if the house had been his own. Sometimes, walking up and down
the whole length of the three drawing-rooms, a strange smile flickered
over his face,--a contemplative smile, which faded away in the next
moment, giving place to that perfection of fashionable indifference to
all things in heaven and earth which was his ordinary expression.
The appointed day came at last, and poor Francis drove down to
Twickenham, looking as pale as his light waistcoat, but supported by his
friend Harcourt Lowther as best man. Once, and once only, Maude Hillary
looked at her discarded lover while she remained Maude Hillary; but
there was a world of mingled scorn and reproach in that one look. Ah,
how different his love must have been from hers! she thought. Had he
forsaken her for a wealthier bride, she would have gone far away from
the sound of his wedding bells, and the sight of his wedding finery. In
that one look she had seen that he was almost as pale as the bridegroom;
but she could not forgive him for being there.
There was all the usual business. Autumnal flowers scattered under the
feet of the bride and bridegroom; charity children in clean pinafores
cheering in shrill treble voices as the bridal carriage drove away; and
then a breakfast, and the popping of champagne corks, and the creaming
of delicately perfumed Moselle, and a little speech-making of the
mildest character; and then a departure amidst all the confusion of a
crowded hall and portico--young-lady intimates pressing forward to
caress the bride; loud-voiced young men congratulating the bridegroom;
servants with white favours standing on tip-toe to get a peep at the
show: and then the postilions crack their whips, and the carriage rolls
away through the chill autumn evening; and Maude sees Twickenham town
spin by her in a dim glimmer of comfortable firelight, twinkling redly
in cottage windows.
The wedding tour had been amongst the many things which Harcourt Lowther
had kindly undertaken to plan for his friend; and after a great deal of
deliberation, that gentleman had pitched upon one of the dullest and
quietest watering-places in Devonshire, as the one spot upon all this
earth best suited for Mr. Tredethlyn and his bride.
“You don’t want the stereotyped Continental tour;--the Rhine steamers
are crowded with cockneys, who find it easier to spout ‘Childe Harold’
than to regulate the administration of their h’s. What do you know about
the castled crag of Drachenfels, dear boy? and what do you care for all
the hackneyed sentimentality about beery old knights and battered old
castles? You don’t speak any language but your honest native tongue, and
you would be bothered out of your life before your travels were over
unless you took a courier--and then imagine seeing nature through the
eyes of a courier! No, my dear Tredethlyn! the sort of thing for you is
some quiet little watering-place,--‘an humble cot, in a tranquil spot,
with a distant view of the changing sea,’ and all that sort of thing; in
other words, a tranquil little retreat where you and Mrs. Tredethlyn may
have time to get acquainted with one another.”
Francis was only too glad to take such pleasant advice. To be alone with
Maude, alone beside the still grey sea in the quiet autumn evenings,
seemed to him the highest bliss that earth could hold for any human
being: and poor Francis blessed his generous friend for the sound
judgment which was to secure him such happiness.
“I dare say I should have gone scampering all over the Continent but for
you, Lowther,” he said, innocently. “Those other fellows at the Cedars
advised a tour through half Europe: ‘See plenty of life,’ they said;
‘freshen yourself up with change of scene, and pick up all the jargon
you can out of Murray, so as to be able to hold your own in society.
Everybody travels nowadays, and it doesn’t do for a fellow with lots of
tin to be behind the rest of the world.’ But I’ll take your advice,
Lowther. I wanted Maude to choose the place for our bridal trip, but she
wouldn’t; so we’ll go to the Devonshire village.”
It is not to be supposed, of course, that Mr. Lowther had any other than
the most friendly intention when he selected Combe Western as the scene
of Francis Tredethlyn’s honeymoon; but, on the other hand, it must be
confessed that had Harcourt wished to inspire Maude with a weariness of
her husband’s society, he could have scarcely selected any place better
calculated to assist him in the carrying out of his design. At Combe
Western, the misty autumn days were unbroken by any change, save the
slow changes of the hours and the gradual darkening of the sky. There
were pleasant drives and romantic scenery to be found in the
neighbourhood of Combe Western; but Devonshire is a rainy county, and as
it rained with little intermission during the whole of that honeymoon
period, Francis Tredethlyn’s bride was compelled to find her chief
amusement in the prim lodging-house drawing-room and the society of her
husband.
And this society was not congenial to her. He was handsome, and pleasant
to look at; manly, good-tempered, generous. No mean or unworthy
sentiment ever dropped from his lips. She respected him, and was
grateful to him; nay, even beyond this, there was a certain latent
affection for him lurking in some corner of her heart; but she was very
tired of him nevertheless. To be truly attached to a person, and
desperately weary of them, is not altogether an impossibility. Are we
not sometimes weary of ourselves, whom we yet love so dearly? When you
get tired of a book, you have nothing to do but close the volume and
restore it to its shelf. But you cannot shut up your friend when he
becomes tedious; you must needs go on, wading through page after page of
his conversation, till you yawn in his face, and arouse him to the
unpleasant conviction that he is a nuisance.
Maude was very gratefully and affectionately disposed towards her
father’s benefactor; but she grew terribly tired of his sole
companionship during that rainy six weeks in the quiet Devonian
watering-place. If the bride and bridegroom had gone on that stereotyped
foreign tour so strongly protested against by Harcourt Lowther, Maude’s
sunny nature would speedily have asserted itself. She would have found
in the rapid changes of scene, in all the pleasant excitement of quick
travelling, plenty of subject-matter for conversation with her new
companion; there would have been always some common ground on which they
could have met, some little incident, among the hundred incidents of a
traveller’s day, which would have aroused a sympathy between them. But
thrown on their own resources at Combe Western, a Horace Walpole and a
Madame du Deffand might have exhausted their conversational powers, and
yawned drearily in each other’s faces. Maude found herself wishing for
the end of her honeymoon before the first week had drawn to its close;
and Francis, always timidly watchful of his wife’s beautiful face, felt
a chill anguish at his heart as he perceived her weariness of spirit.
Thus it was that, when they returned to London, the husband and wife
were little nearer to each other than on their wedding-day. No pleasant
familiarity with each other’s thoughts and feelings had arisen during
that dull residence in a dull watering-place. That subtle process of
assimilation by which--except in some dismal examples--husband and wife
grow like each other in mind and feeling, had not yet begun. They were
strangers still; in spite of Maude’s esteem for her husband’s character,
in spite of Francis Tredethlyn’s blind idolatry of his wife’s
perfections; and Harcourt Lowther, who was one of the guests at their
first dinner-party, was not slow to recognize the state of the case.
“You’ll get on admirably together by-and-by, dear boy,” he said to
Francis, as they smoked their cigars together in a luxurious little
study behind the big library, some days after the great dinner. “You’ll
get on superbly with your lovely wife, if you only play your cards
cleverly. There must be no Darby and Joan business, you know--no
sentimentalism. Lionel Hillary’s daughter is just the woman to be
disgusted by that sort of thing. It was all very well, of course, to do
the romantic during the honeymoon; but that’s all over now; your wife
will go her way, and you’ll go yours. Her friends will absorb a great
deal of her time and attention; your friends will absorb you. You’ll
have your club, your horses, your men’s parties, and perhaps the
House,--for you ought decidedly to get into Parliament,--and it will be
utterly impossible for you to spend all your mornings hanging about your
wife’s rooms, or nursing her Skye terriers, as you seem to have done
hitherto.”
“But I like so much to be with her,” Francis remonstrated, piteously.
“It’s very friendly of you to give me these hints, and I dare say you’re
right, to some degree. I know Maude used to seem very tired at Combe
Western, and we both got into the habit of looking at our watches in a
dispiriting kind of way every quarter of an hour; but since we’ve come
to London she has quite recovered her spirits, and we are so happy
together;--you should have heard her laugh the other morning, when I
taught one of the Skyes to shoulder arms with a lead-pencil.”
Mr. Tredethlyn laughed aloud himself at the recollection of this feat.