Only a clod
“I told you I’d show you life, dear boy,” he said; “and I mean to keep
my word. While Mrs. Tredethlyn amuses herself with the usual social
treadmill business--perpetually moving on, and never getting any
farther--you and I will see a world in which life is worth living.”
Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn was lured away from a home in which
he was taught to believe himself unappreciated, and introduced for the
first time within the unholy precincts of the kingdom of Bohemia.
He entered the mysterious regions at first very reluctantly. He had the
ignorant rustic’s notion of Vice, and fancied that she would show
herself in naked hideousness; but he found her with her natural face
hidden under a plaster mask modelled from the fair countenance of
Virtue. It was something of a caricature, perhaps; for all imitations
are so apt to become exaggerations. He found that Bohemia was a kind of
Belgravia in electro-plate. There were the same dresses and properties,
only a little tarnished and faded; the same effects, always considerably
overdone; the same jargon, but louder and coarser. Life in Bohemia
seemed like a Transpontine version of a West-end drama, with cheaper
scenery and actors, and a more uproarious audience.
This was the kingdom with whose inner mysteries Harcourt Lowther
affected a fashionable familiarity. He presented his wealthy friend to
the potentates of the kingdom, and carried him hither and thither to
worship at numerous temples, whose distinguishing features were the
flare of gas-lamps, and the popping of champagne corks, branded with the
obscurest names in the catalogue of wine-growers, and paid for at the
highest rate known in the London market.
Perhaps in all his wanderings in the darksome wilderness which his
Mentor called London life, Francis Tredethlyn’s worst sin was the
perpetual “standing” of spurious sparkling wines, and the waste of a
good deal of money lost at unlimited loo, or blind hookey, as the case
might be. He had high animal spirits and thirty thousand a year, which
common report exaggerated into sixty thousand, and which the more
imaginative denizens of Bohemia multiplied into fabulous and
incalculable riches; so that he met with a very cordial welcome from the
magnates of the land. But the descent of Avernus, however easy it may
be, is a gradual slope, and not a precipitous mountain-side, down which
a man can be flung headlong by one push from a friendly hand. Francis
Tredethlyn yawned in the faces of the brightest stars in the Bohemian
hemisphere. His frank nature revolted against the shallow falsehoods
around and about him. The glare of the gas seemed to have no brilliancy:
the bloom upon the women’s faces was only so much vermilion and
crimson-lake bought at the perfumer’s shop, and ghastly to look at in a
sidelight. The laughter had the false ring of spurious coin; the music
was out of tune. In all this little world there was no element of
spontaneity; except perhaps in the uproarious gaiety of some boyish
country squire making a railroad journey through some fine old property
that had been kept sacred and unbroken for half-a-dozen centuries, to be
squandered on a handful of pearls to melt in Cleopatra’s wine, or
expended on the soaps and perfumeries of a modern Lamia.
There was neither bloom nor freshness on anything except on the wings of
a few pigeons newly lured into the haunts of the vulture tribe.
Everything else was false, and withered, and faded. The smiles of the
women, the friendship of the men, were as spurious as the rhubarb
champagnes and gooseberry Moselles, and were bought and sold like them.
Mephistopheles may lead his pupil to the Brocken, but he cannot compel
the young man to enjoy himself amongst the wicked revellers; nor can he
altogether prevent the neophyte from perceiving such small
_inconvenances_ as occasional red mice hopping out of the mouths of
otherwise charming young damsels.
Harcourt Lowther found it very hard work to keep Francis Tredethlyn
amused, night after night, in remote and unapproachable regions, whose
very names were only to be spoken in hushed accents over the fourth
bottle of Chambertin or Clos Vougeot at a bachelor’s dessert. Poor Frank
would rather have been dancing attendance upon his wife, and trampling
on the silken trains of stern matrons and dowagers at the dullest
“Wednesday,” or “Tuesday,” or “Saturday,” in all the stuccoed mansions
in which Maude’s pretty face and pleasant manners, and his own good old
Cornish name and comfortable income, had secured his footing. He was
very good-natured, and did not care how much bad wine he was called upon
to pay for. He could lose a heavy sum at blind hookey without the
faintest contraction of his black eyebrows, or the smallest depression
of his lower jaw. But he did not enjoy himself.
He did not enjoy himself--and yet somehow or other he went again and
again to the same temples, always under convoy of his friend Harcourt,
and generally very firmly resolved that each visit should be the last.
But there was always some special reason for another visit--an
appointment with some elegant acquaintance of the vulture tribe, who
wanted his revenge at blind hookey; or a little dinner to be given at
the Star and Garter, in honour of some beautiful Free-Lance, whose chief
fascinations were the smoking of tissue-paper cigarettes and a vivacious
disregard of Lindley Murray. There was always some engagement of this
kind; and as it happened somehow that Francis Tredethlyn generally found
himself pledged to act as paymaster, it would of course have been very
unmanly to draw back. If he could have sent his friend Lowther and a
blank cheque as a substitute for his own presence, he would gladly have
done so; but his friend Lowther took care to make that impossible. So
the matter always ended by Mr. Tredethlyn finding himself, at some time
on the wrong side of midnight seated at the head of a glittering
dinner-table; with the ruins of an expensive dessert and the faces of
his guests only dimly visible athwart a thick and stifling vapour of
cigar smoke; while the clamour of strident laughter mingled with the
occasional chinking and clattering of glass, as some applauding hand
thumped its owner’s approval of the florid sentiments in an eloquent
postprandial oration.
It is impossible to be perpetually paying for sparkling wines without
occasionally drinking a little too freely of their bubbling vintage.
Francis Tredethlyn, under the influence of unlimited Moet or Clicquot,
found the Bohemians a much pleasanter kind of people than when he
contemplated them in the cold grey morning light of sobriety. Harcourt
Lowther took care that his friend should pretty generally look at things
through a rose-tinted medium engendered of the juice of the grape; for
he found that it was by this means alone that he could retain his hold
upon his pupil.
Go where he might, the Cornishman carried his wife’s image in his heart,
and he would have left the most brilliant assemblage in Bohemia for a
quiet _tête-à-tête_ in Maude’s boudoir; if his friend Harcourt had not
carefully impressed upon him that his entrance into that pretty little
chamber was an intrusion only tolerated by Mrs. Tredethlyn’s good
nature.
There is no need to enter very minutely upon the details of the work
which Harcourt Lowther was doing. The art of ruining a well-disposed
young man is not a very difficult one; but Mr. Lowther had reduced the
art into a science. His great effects were not the sublime hazards of
genius, but the calculated results of a carefully studied process. So
many nights in a tainted atmosphere; so many Richmond and Greenwich
dinners; so many subtle insinuations of Maude’s indifference, must
produce such and such an effect. Mr. Lowther displayed none of that
impolitic and vulgar haste with which a meaner man might ruin his
friend. He never hurried his work by so much as a single step taken
before its time. But he never wavered, or relented, or turned aside even
for one moment from the course which he had mapped out for himself. So,
in the course of that London season, it became quite a common thing for
a street hansom to bring Mr. Tredethlyn to the gigantic stuccoed mansion
which he called his own in the early sunlight of a spring morning. There
were even times when the returning wanderer found it no easy matter to
open a door with a patent latch-key, which _would_ go meandering
hopelessly over the panel of the door, scratching all manner of
eccentric circles and parabolas on the varnish, instead of finding its
way into the key-hole. There was one awful night, on which Maude, coming
home from some very late assembly, was stumbled against by a tipsy man
who was groping his way up the great stone staircase, and found, to her
unutterable horror, that the tipsy man--who apologized profusely for
tearing half-a-dozen yards of Mechlin from the hem of her skirt,
declaring that he was “ver’ sorr’, ’pon m’ wor’; b’t y’ see, m’ dea’
Maurr, if y’ w’ll wear dress s’ long, mussn’ be s’prise get torr t’
piecess”--was her husband.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVI.
A CHILLING RECONCILIATION.
That unfortunate meeting on the stairs made a very deep impression upon
Maude Tredethlyn. She had never before encountered drunkenness; and it
was one of those sins which seemed to her to belong to a region of outer
darkness, in which decent people had no place. Her father had always
been as sober as an anchorite; her father’s guests were gentlemen. She
had heard, now and then, in the course of her life at the Cedars, of a
drunken gardener dismissed with ignominy from the gardens--a drunken
groom degraded from has rank in the stables. But Francis, her
husband,--that _he_ should be thick of speech and unsteady of foot under
the influence of strong drink!--it seemed almost too horrible for
belief. She lay awake in the morning sunlight, thinking of Francis
Tredethlyn’s misdemeanour.
“And just as I fancied that I was beginning to love him!” she thought,
regretfully. Would they meet at breakfast? she wondered. And if they did
meet, what would Francis say to her? A sickly dread of that meeting took
possession of her mind. If he apologized, how was she to answer him?
Would it be possible for her to conceal her disgust?
“Let me remember his goodness to my father,” she murmured. “Oh, can I
ever be so base as to forget that?”
The possible meeting at the breakfast-table was very easily avoided.
Mrs. Tredethlyn had a headache, and took her strong green tea and dry
toast in the pretty little boudoir, with the pink draperies and Parian
statuettes, the satin-wood cabinets and bookcases, the Persian carpets
and polar-bear-skin rugs, the marqueterie _jardinières_, and toy
Swiss-cottage birdcages, selected by Harcourt Lowther. It was rather an
enervating little boudoir, eminently adapted for the perusal of French
novels, and the neglect of all the duties of life. Mrs. Tredethlyn
breakfasted in this room; so there was no uncomfortable meeting between
the husband and wife. Francis left the house before noon, in order to
keep an appointment with his friend Mr. Lowther. They were going
together to the Doncaster spring meeting, where Bohemianism would be
rampant, and were to be away for some days. Poor Francis ran into the
library, while his friend waited for him, and scribbled a hasty note to
his wife, full of penitence and self-humiliation. He gave the missive to
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s maid at the foot of the stairs, while Harcourt was
standing in a little room opening out of the hall, arranging the strap
of a race-glass across his light overcoat. Mr. Tredethlyn went back to