Only a clod
replied only by a stony glare. She was petrified by the audacity of this
smiling creature in mauve who dared to take possession of her governess.
The youthful mind, soured by a long course of German declensions, is apt
to contemplate everything in a gloomy aspect.
Maude and Julia went past poor Haydon’s big cold picture, and made their
way to a small room which was quite empty. Julia’s face had a stern
darkness upon it, which might have frightened any one less hopeful than
Maude; but that young lady had been surrounded by an atmosphere of love
from her cradle upwards, and was entirely unacquainted with the
diagnosis of hatred. She despatched the children to look at the pictures
in the larger rooms, and then laying her hand caressingly upon Miss
Desmond’s arm, she said, very earnestly,--
“Dearest Julia, I hope you have forgiven me?”
Miss Desmond locked her lips, and stood for some moments with her face
quite fixed, staring at vacancy. There were hollow rings round the dark
eyes now, and the oval cheeks had lost their smooth outline. Perpetual
drudgery and friendless solitude had brought Julia very low; but the
Desmond pride still struggled for the mastery over its grim
assailant--necessity.
“I don’t know that I have anything to forgive,” said she, after an
ominous pause; “Mr. Tredethlyn was free to transfer his affections as
often as he chose. I was very glad to read of your marriage, for it was
at least satisfactory to find that he had not changed his mind a second
time. I do not blame any one but myself, Mrs. Tredethlyn. I should have
been wiser than to entrust my happiness to a man who----”
Miss Desmond stopped abruptly. She made a long pause, during which she
contemplated Maude, almost as if she had been looking for some tender
spot in which to plant her dagger.
“I must not forget that he is your husband, and I do not wish to say
anything humiliating to you; but I _cannot_ forget that he is not a
gentleman. No gentleman would have treated any woman as Mr. Tredethlyn
treated me.”
If Julia’s conscience had had a voice, it might perhaps have chimed in
with an awkward question here: “And would any lady have spread a net to
catch a rich husband, Julia, trading on the generosity of his simple
nature, and angling for the fortune of a man whose heart was obviously
given to another?”
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bright face crimsoned, and her lower lip fell a
little. It is not to be supposed that she could be very fond of her
husband; but she felt any allusion to his shortcomings almost as keenly
as if he had been the incarnation of her girlish dreams. Whatever he
was, he was hers, and she was responsible for him.
“If generosity of heart could make a gentleman, Julia,” she said, almost
entreatingly, “I think Francis would be the first of gentlemen.”
Miss Desmond did not condescend to reply to this observation.
“Oh, Julia,” Mrs. Tredethlyn said, after another little pause, “how can
you be so unkind and unforgiving? Have you forgotten how happy we used
to be together long ago at the Cedars? If--if I thought you were
pleasantly circumstanced now, I would not worry you with any proffers of
friendship; but somehow I cannot think that you are happy. Dear Julia,
forgive me for the past, and trust me once more.”
The stony look in Miss Desmond’s face did not melt away under the
influence of Maude’s tenderness; but presently, with an almost awful
suddenness, she sank upon the nearest chair, dropped her face upon her
clasped hands, and burst into a passion of tears--convulsive sobs that
shook her with their hysterical force. The strong will of the Desmonds
asserted itself to the very last, for this passionate outburst was
almost noiseless. The slender frame writhed and trembled, the chest
heaved, the small hands were clenched convulsively, but there was no
vulgar outcry. Miss Desmond recovered herself almost as suddenly as she
had given way to her emotion, and drew up her head proudly, though her
face was blotted with tears.
“Heaven help me!” she exclaimed; “what a poor weak wretch I am!”
“You will let me be your friend again, won’t you, Julia? You’ll come and
live with me once more? You need see very little of Mr. Tredethlyn, if
you dislike him. He and I are quite fashionable people, I assure you,
and he is very seldom at home. I shall be so glad to have you with me. I
go a great deal into society, and I know you like society, Julia. Come,
dear, let us be friends again, just as we used to be in the dear old
times.”
Maude gave a little sigh--she was apt now and then to think
sentimentally of that remote period of her existence, some four or five
years back, when she had believed that the happiest fate Heaven could
award her would be a union with Harcourt Lowther. Even now, though she
had schooled herself to think of him coldly, though she tried very hard
not to think of him at all, the memory of the old time would come back;
the picture of the home that might have been--the little cottage in St.
John’s Wood--the long quiet evenings, made delightful by genial
companionship--the pleasant hours devoted to art--the dear old
concertante duets by Mozart and Beethoven--the “two souls with but a
single thought, two hearts that beat as one,”--the images of these
things were apt to arise suddenly before her, in the midst of her
frivolous pleasure in her fine dresses, and gorgeous house, and admiring
friends.
“Dear Julia,” she said, winding one arm caressingly about the Irish
girl, “you will come, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Miss Desmond answered, “I will come if you want me. But I must
come upon a new footing. This time I must work for my wages. I have been
a hired slave ever since I left your father’s house. I will be your
servant, Mrs. Tredethlyn, if you choose to hire me.”
“Julia, you will be my friend, just as you used to be.”
“No,” cried Miss Desmond, with a resolute gesture of her hand, “no; if
you want a companion to keep your keys and attend to your lapdogs, to
finish fancy-work that you have begun and grown tired of, to read French
novels to you when you want to be read to sleep, to write your letters
of invitation, to take the bass in your duets, or carry an occasional
message to your milliner,--if you want a person of this kind, I am quite
willing to be that person.”
“Julia!”
“I will come to you on those terms, or not at all.”
“You shall come to me on any terms you please, so long as you come.”
“Very well, then, I will come. My present employer gives me sixty
guineas a year, and makes me work harder than a pack-horse. You can give
me the same money, if you think my services worth so much. I will make
arrangements for leaving my present situation. A housemaid left the
other day, and I believe she gave her mistress a month’s notice--I
suppose the same rule will hold good with me: I will come to you at the
end of that time, unless you change your mind in the meanwhile.”
“I shall not change my mind; I only wish you could come to me to-day.
Take my card, dear, and give me yours.”
“I have no cards,” answered Miss Desmond. “I have neither name nor place
in the world, and have no need of visiting-cards.”
She wrote her address upon the back of an envelope, and gave it to Mrs.
Tredethlyn. To the last her manner was cold and ungracious: but Maude
parted from her happy in the idea that she had rescued her old companion
from a life of drudgery.
“Why should I not be her hired slave? I shall still have the right to
hate her,” thought Miss Desmond, as she went back to Bayswater with her
gloomy charges.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVII.
SEEING A GHOST.
Under the perpetual influence of his friend and master, Harcourt
Lowther, Mr. Tredethlyn’s days and nights were so fully occupied that he
had very little leisure for serious thought. Day by day the patient
master taught his deadly lesson; day by day the luckless pupil took his
teacher’s precepts more deeply to heart. The simple, credulous nature
was as malleable as clay under the practised hand of the modeller, and
took any shape Mr. Lowther chose to give it.
Francis was fully impressed with the idea that his money had purchased a
lovely wife whose heart could never be given to him. All that fair
fabric of hopes and dreams which had been his when he married Maude
Hillary had been slowly but surely undermined, and there was nothing
left of its brightness but the memory that it once had been. He thought
of those foolish hopes now with anger and bitterness. Could he at any
time have been so mad, so blind, so besotted, as to believe that this
beautiful creature, perpetually floating in an atmosphere of frivolity
and adulation, would ever fold her wings to nestle tenderly in his rude
breast? Othello, recalled to the sense of his declining years and grimy
visage by the friendly bluntness of Iago, could scarcely have thought
more bitterly of his lovely Venetian bride than Francis thought of Maude
after six months’ daily association with his old master. But if the
poison was quick to do its deadly work, the antidote was always at hand.
With thirty thousand a year and a fine constitution, what need has a
young man for reflection? It is all very well for Mr. Young the poet,
having failed to obtain wealth or preferment, to retire from a world
which has treated him ill, and meditate upon the transitory nature of
earthly blessings that he has been unable to obtain; but with youth and
thirty thousand per annum, surely no man need be bored by such a
darksome guest as dull care. Harcourt Lowther did his best to shield his
friend from the gloomy intruder by contriving that Francis Tredethlyn’s
existence should be one perpetual fever of hurry and excitement. But
though you may carry a man from racecourse to racecourse, by shrieking
expresses tearing through the darkness of the night; though you may
steep him to the lips in theatres and dancing-halls; though you may drag
him from one scene of mad unrest to another, till his tired eyeballs
have lost their power to see anything but one wearisome confusion of gas
light and colour,--you _cannot_ prevent him from thinking. The
involuntary process goes on in spite of him. He will think in a hansom
cab tearing over the stones of the Haymarket, in an express train
rushing towards Newmarket at sixty miles an hour, on the box-seat of a
guardsman’s drag, on the rattling fire-engine of an aristocratic amateur
Braidwood, on the downs at Epsom--yes, even at the final rush, when
every eye is strained to concentrate its power of sight upon one speck
of colour, the man’s mind, for ever the veriest slave to follow that
will-o’-the-wisp called association, will wander away in spite of
him,--to mourn above a baby’s grave, to sit amidst the perfume of
honeysuckle and roses in a still summer twilight trifling with the rings
on a woman’s hand.
There were times when thought would come to Francis Tredethlyn, in spite
of all his friend’s watchful care. He would sit at the head of a
dinner-table at the Crown and Sceptre, staring vacantly at the frisky
wine-bubbles in his shallow glass, and thinking how happy he might have
been if Maude had only loved him. Ah, this poor substitute of noise
instead of mirth,--this pitiful tinsel of dissipation in place of the
pure gold of happiness,--how miserable a mockery it was even at the
best!
Mr. Lowther generally broke in upon such gloomy reveries as these by
calling to the waiter to exchange his friend’s shallow glass for a
tumbler. But there are pangs of regret not to be lulled to slumber by
all the sparkling wines that were ever grown in the fair champagne
country, and Harcourt Lowther sometimes found his work very difficult.