Only a clod
“I was a fool to think that Maude Hillary could be constant to me!” he
muttered, angrily. In his anger against a world that had treated him so
badly, he was angry with himself for having been so much a fool as to
expect better treatment. He walked to a little looking-glass hanging
over the mantelpiece, and looked at his handsome face. Was it the face
of a man who was to have no place in the world? Were his many graces of
person, his charm of manner, his versatility of mind, to serve for
nothing after all?
“When I think of the fellows who get on in the world, I feel inclined to
make an end of all this by cutting my throat,” he said, as he frowned at
the image in the glass.
He felt the region of the jugular vein softly with the ends of his
fingers as he spoke, and wondered whether death by the severance of that
important artery was a very painful finish for a man to make. He thought
of how he might look if Francis Tredethlyn, finding him late to rise one
morning, broke into his room and saw him lying in the sunny little
chamber deluged with blood and stone dead. He had been very religiously
brought up, amongst gentle, true-hearted women; but there was no more
pious compunction in his mind as he thought of suicide than there might
have been in the mind of an aboriginal inhabitant of the Solomon
Islands. He had a mother at home--a mother who believed in him and
idolized him, to the disparagement of all other creatures; but no image
of her grief and despair arose between him and the scheme of a desperate
death. His thoughts travelled in a narrow circle, of which self was the
unchanging centre.
“I have heard of men making away with themselves on the very eve of some
event which would have made a complete change in their fortunes,” he
thought presently. “I never read the story of a suicide that did not
seem more or less the story of a fool. No, my death shall never make a
paragraph for a newspaper. I must be very hard pushed when I come to
that. This place gives me the blue-devils, and everything looks black to
me out here. I wish Abel Janz Tasman and Captain Cook had perished
before ever they sighted this dismal land. I wish all the lot of petty
Dutch traders and navigators had come to an untimely end before ever
they discovered any one of these miserable islands, which have been a
paradise for convicts and scoundrels, and a hell for gentlemen, during
the last half-century. How was I to know, when I bought a commission in
her Majesty’s service, that the first stage on the road to martial glory
was to be the post of head-gaoler at a settlement in the Antipodes? The
papers talk of a change in the transportation system, a change that will
rid Van Diemen’s Land of its present delightful inhabitants; but no
change is likely to come about in my time. I shall have to drag my chain
out to the last link, I dare say. It’s better to be born lucky than
rich, says the proverb; but how about the poor devils who are neither
rich nor lucky?”
A rap on the little door, that opened out of the sitting-room on to a
patch of garden which lay between the house and the high road, startled
Mr. Lowther out of his long reverie.
“It’s the fellow with the letters,” he cried; and before Francis
Tredethlyn could emerge from the inner room, his master had opened the
door, and had taken a little packet of letters, newspapers, and
magazines from the man who brought them. “One from my mother; one
from--yes--from Maude, at last; the _Times_, _Punch_, _Blackwood’s_,
_United Service_, and the lawyer’s letter!--‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’
eh? The legacy must be something more than five hundred, my man, or
they’d hardly dub you Esquire.”
He tossed the letter over to his servant as he spoke, and looked at the
Cornishman furtively, with something like envy expressed in his look.
Francis Tredethlyn received the lawyers’ epistle very coolly, and
retired into the adjoining room to read it, while his master sat at the
table in the parlour, tearing off the flimsy envelope of a letter with a
hasty nervous hand.
“From Maude!” he muttered. “At last, my lady: at last, at last!”
The letter was a very long one, written in a clear and bold yet
sufficiently feminine hand, on slippery pink paper scented with a
perfume that had survived an Australian voyage. The contents of the
letter must have been tolerably pleasing to Harcourt Lowther, for he
smiled as he read, and seemed to forget all about Francis Tredethlyn’s
legacy.
“I miss you very much, though papa surrounds us with gaiety; indeed, I
think we have been gayer than ever lately; and he never seems so happy
as when our dear old lawn is crowded with visitors. But I miss you,
Harcourt, in spite of all the cruel insinuations in your last letter.
The summer evenings seem long and dreary when I think of you, so far
away, so unhappy, as your letters tell me you are, Harcourt, though you
are too unselfish to admit the truth in plain words. I scarcely open the
piano once in a month, now that I have no one to play concertante duets.
I scarcely care for a new opera; for the men who come into our box bore
me to death with their vapid talk, and I know that not one of them
understands what he talks about. I am not happy, Harcourt, though you
taunt me with my wealth and my position, and the difference between our
lives. I am not happy, for our future seems to grow darker and darker
every day. I have mentioned you to my father several times, and every
time he seems more angry than the last; so now I feel that your name is
tacitly tabooed; and any chance allusion to you from the lips of
strangers makes me tremble and turn cold. I have tried in vain to
comprehend the reason of my father’s aversion to any thought of a
marriage between you and me. I have been so much a spoiled child, that
to be thwarted or opposed on any subject seems strange to me, most of
all when that subject is so near my heart. I can scarcely think that my
dear father would allow any consideration of fortune to stand in the way
of happiness, and yet that is the only consideration that can influence
him, for I know that he always liked and admired you. You must awhile be
patient: what I can do I will. And you must trust me, dear Harcourt, and
not pain me again as you have pained me by those unkind doubts of my
constancy. You know that money has never been any consideration with me;
and you ought to know that I would willingly lose every penny of my
fortune rather than sacrifice my promise to you.”
“O yes; that’s all very well!” muttered Mr. Lowther peevishly, after
having read this part of Miss Hillary’s epistle twice over; “but Lionel
Hillary’s daughter with fifty thousand pounds or so, and without a
penny, are two very different people. Not but what she’s always a
beautiful girl and a charming girl; but a man can have his pick of
charming and beautiful girls, if _that’s_ all he wants to set him up in
life. I love her, Heaven knows; and the sight of her writing sends a
thrill through my veins like the touch of her hand, or the fluttering of
her breath upon my cheek. But poverty makes a man practical, and I think
I never read a letter that had less of the practical in it than this
letter. It’s a woman’s epistle all over. We must be patient, and wait
till we’re worn out by waiting, and the engagement between us becomes a
chain that binds us both from better things, and the sound of each
other’s name becomes a nuisance to us from its associations of trouble
and responsibility. That’s what a long engagement generally comes to. If
I’d distinguished myself in India, led a desperate charge against
orders, or taken the gate of an Affghan fortress, or done something
reckless and mad-headed and lucky, and could have gone back with a
captaincy, and a dash of newspaper celebrity about my name, I might have
hoped that old Hillary, in a moment of maudlin after-dinner generosity,
would have given his consent to my marriage with Maude. But how am I to
present myself at Twickenham, and say, ‘I have been taking care of
convicts for the last two years,--not particularly well, for more
convicts have escaped into the bush in my time than in any other man’s
time, according to the reports,--and I have come back to England with
the same rank that I had when I left, and with less money than I took
away with me’? Can I go to Lionel Hillary and say that? Is that the sort
of argument which will induce a man to give me his daughter and her
fortune?”
He went back to Miss Hillary’s letter. It was only a frivolous letter,
after all; and it contained more intelligence about a morning concert in
Hanover Square, a regatta at Ryde, and a preternaturally sagacious
Skye-terrier, than was likely to be gratifying to a discontented exile
at Port Arthur. But Mr. Lowther was fain to content himself as he might
with the pretty girlish gossip. It was something, after all his
grumbling, to receive the assurance that he was not entirely forgotten
by the only daughter and sole heiress of one of the richest merchants in
the city of London.
He looked up presently from his letter, to see Francis Tredethlyn
standing in the doorway between the two rooms, pale to the lips, and
clutching at his throat as if he had some difficulty in breathing.
“What’s the matter, man?” asked the ensign; “hasn’t the old chap left
you any money, after all?”
“It isn’t that, sir,” gasped the soldier; “there’s money enough and to
spare. It’s my cousin Susy; that poor little innocent creature, that was
as pure as the apple-blossoms on the gnarled old trees in the orchard
when I left home. She’s done something, sir--something that turned her
father against her. She’s gone away, sir, and no one knows where she’s
gone, or what’s come of her, or whether she’s dead or alive. And her
father disinherited her, poor lost lamb; and--that’ll tell you all about
the fortune, sir, if you want to know about it.” Francis Tredethlyn
threw the lawyer’s letter upon the table before his master, and walked
away to the window--the same window at which the ensign had stood
looking out at the convicts half an hour before.
Harcourt Lowther read the lawyer’s letter, at first with a listless,
indifferent air, and then as eagerly as if he had been reading his own
death-warrant. It was a long letter, worded in a very formal manner, but
it set forth the fact that the fortune left by Oliver Tredethlyn to his
nephew Francis amounted to something over thirty thousand a year.
For some minutes after this fact had been made clear to him Harcourt
Lowther sat with the open letter before him, staring at the lines. Then
suddenly the blank stupor upon his face gave way to a look of despair.
The ensign flung his head and arms upon the table, and burst into tears.
“I have been eating my own heart in this place for nearly two years,” he
sobbed, “and not one ray of light--no, by the heaven above me! not
one--has dawned upon my life; and a valet, a private soldier, the fellow
who scours my rooms and blacks my boots, has thirty thousand a year left
him!”
There was something so terrible in this hysterical outburst of rage and
envy, something so utterly piteous in this unmanly revolt against
another man’s good fortune, that Francis Tredethlyn forgot his own
trouble before the aspect of his master’s degradation.
“Don’t, sir,” he cried, “for God’s sake, don’t do that! All the riches
in the world wouldn’t pay a man for taking on like that. If you want
money, you’re welcome to borrow some of mine as soon as ever I get the
power to lend it. There’s more than I care to have, or could ever spend.
You’ll be welcome to what you want, Mr. Lowther. I don’t set much
account upon money, and I don’t think I ever shall; and the thoughts of
this fortune don’t give me half the pleasure I’ve felt in the gift of a