Only a clod
not so much as a game-keeper’s cottage or a scrap of meadow-land was
reserved for the luckless junior. Mrs. Lowther had been mistress of a
small fortune, but that had been spent on the education of the two young
men,--Harcourt in this matter, as in all others, going to the wall; for
his University career had been cut short in order that his brother’s
debts might be paid, and that extravagant gentleman be enabled to face
the big-wigs of his college without fear of clamorous creditors, and
read at leisure for a degree which he was too lazy to succeed in
getting. After this Harcourt’s prospects had again been sacrificed, and
the young barrister, unable to live at the bar, had been fain to accept
an ensign’s commission; while Roderick, pushed into the diplomatic world
by a desperate effort of family interest, exhibited his handsome face at
the Prussian Court, and squandered every farthing that he could screw
out of his father’s slender purse. When the purse had become as empty as
it well could, there had been the usual remonstrances, the usual bad
feeling which is likely to arise between an utterly selfish and
unprincipled young man and the father who is no longer able to be of any
use to him, and who takes the liberty of resenting the extravagance
which has involved his later life in difficulties.
Besides the advantages obtained from his father’s partiality, Roderick
Lowther had been the favourite of a maiden aunt of miserly habits and
independent fortune, who had condescended to give him her name at the
baptismal font, and who had never bestowed on him anything else--except,
indeed, a neat cloth-bound copy of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” presented
to the lad one birthday, and promptly disposed of at a rag-and-bone shop
in the High Street of Harrow for the small sum of fourpence. But
although Miss Dorothea Burnett had not been very liberal in her
donations to her favourite nephew during her lifetime, it was supposed
that, after her departure from this world, the young man would reap the
reward of occasional dutifully-worded letters and affected deference to
her wishes, and that the reward would be a very substantial one; for
Miss Burnett had contrived to swell her own little fortune by many stray
windfalls in the way of legacies from relatives, whose regard her busy
married sister Mrs. Lowther had neglected to cultivate. Beyond this, the
maiden lady had bought small but profitable tenements, and had dabbled a
little in shares; and she had watched her small investments with an
intelligence, and nursed them with a tenderness, which her stockbroker
had admiringly declared to be a credit to the sex she adorned by her
commercial acumen.
So Roderick Lowther, finding his younger brother on the field, was
alarmed by the idea that he might have been undermined in this
direction, and was by no means inclined to lose any time before
presenting himself to his spinster aunt. He brushed and curled his amber
whiskers with more than usual circumspection, therefore, on the morning
after the dinner at Mrs. Tredethlyn’s; and walking through Covent
Garden, on his way to Miss Burnett’s Bloomsbury hermitage, he expended
sixpence on a hothouse flower to put in the button-hole of the dark-blue
coat which he wore under a flimsy outer garment of pale grey. He had
dressed himself very carefully, for he knew that, in spite of the maiden
lady’s lectures on the subject of prudence, her feminine eye was
fascinated by the elegant frivolities which she affected to disapprove.
Miss Burnett occupied a very big house in the dullest street in
Bloomsbury--a dismal _cul de sac_, in which there was almost always an
elderly organ-grinder playing “Home, sweet home,” or the “Old
Hundredth,” with a little group of squalid children gathered round him.
The big house smelt like a tomb, and was almost as rarely opened as if
it had been one; for the butcher-boy who brought Miss Burnett’s
mutton-chop, or the half-pound of steak or three-quarters of liver, upon
which Miss Burnett’s servant was wont to make her repast, handed his
wares across the area-gate, and exchanged no word of comment with the
grim damsel who received them, knowing very well that the lady of the
house sat at her favourite window in the front parlour, with her open
Bible before her, and a watchful eye upon the outer world, which some
sentimental Christians might have thought scarcely consistent with so
much piety.
The grim damsel who admitted Roderick Lowther to Miss Burnett’s darksome
abode relaxed her ordinary sternness of visage into something faintly
resembling a smile as she recognized her mistress’s nephew.
“Your aunt has been very ill since you were last here, Mr. Lowther,” the
woman said, in answer to Roderick’s inquiry. “She was very bad with her
asthma all the winter; but the warm spring weather brought her round
again.”
“Yes,” thought the young man, “the spring weather always does bring her
round,--and always will, I suppose, till I am dead and in my grave.”
He was ushered into the dining-room while this irreverent idea was in
his mind; and the next minute he was seated opposite to his aunt,
inquiring tenderly about her asthma. The dining-room was very dismal.
There was more mahogany furniture and brown damask than is compatible
with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, and the walls were rendered
ghastly by some hideous preparations painted in asphaltum, and
exhibiting gigantic cracks that looked like gory, yawning
wounds,--preparations which, on account of their smoky nature and
revolting choice of subject, were supposed to be the work of the old
masters.
“I am very glad to see you, my dear Roderick,” said Miss Burnett,
gravely; “as glad as I can be about anything in this carnal life,” added
the old lady, whose spirits had been revived that morning by a rise of
one and a quarter per cent. in the value of her pet investment. “But we
are taught not to rejoice, Roderick, except in that which----Is that a
hothouse flower, my dear?” inquired Miss Burnett, looking sharply at the
myosotis in her nephew’s button-hole. “Dear, dear! what an extravagant
age it is! You are looking very well, my dear Roderick. I dare say you
are what a worldly-minded person would call very handsome; but we must
try to remember that we are all worms,” murmured the old lady with a
doleful sigh; for she took the gloomy view of things which is so common
to some people who read that Gospel which is all life and colour and
brightness, full of the happy faces of merry-makers at a bridal
festival, and little children gathering round a favourite Teacher’s
knees, radiant with sudden rejoicings in mourning households, the dead
restored to smile upon the living. There is something strange in the
dull grey tint which some worshippers are able to infuse into a story
that a painter can hardly read without feeling the tropical heat of a
meridian sun, the perfume of a thousand lilies, the spicy odours of the
feathery palms, and the free dash of Galilee’s blue waves about the prow
of a fisherman’s frail bark sailing gaily under an Eastern sky. Surely
the richness of colour with which the Catholic Church invests the
Christian faith is, after all, only the natural attribute of a religion
which arose amid the splendour and beauty of the Holy Land!
“I hope, my dear Roderick,” said the maiden lady, very solemnly, “that
while absent in those idolatrous foreign lands, you kept the promise
which you gave me before leaving England.”
“My dear aunt,” murmured the young man, who had quite forgotten having
made any promise whatever to his pious relative, and was painfully
mystified by this address, “I assure you that I----”
He would have broken down here, but the lady came to his rescue.
“Don’t prevaricate, Roderick!” she exclaimed, sternly. “Did you, or did
you not, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship during your sojourn
among the high priests of Baal? Did you, or did you not, sit under one
of those idolatrous worshippers of stocks and stones? And oh, that I
should live to see candlesticks on the altar of a church in this very
neighbourhood!” cried Miss Burnett, with a sudden burst of indignation;
“and to hear snuffling, which I at first attributed to a cold in the
head, but afterwards ascertained to be the wicked workings of ROME!”
The stanch Dorothea paused for a few moments to recover her indignation,
and then tackled her nephew once more.
“You promised me, before going to Belgium, that you would not, however
tempted, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship,” she said.
“And I did _not_, my dear aunt,” answered Roderick, promptly; “I give
you my word of honour as a gentleman.” “Nor any other place of worship,”
thought the heir, as his aunt nodded approvingly.
And then there was a little more talk, chiefly taking the form of a
catechism, which Mr. Lowther went through triumphantly, since his
answers to the old lady’s inquiries were shaped in accordance with his
knowledge of what was likely to please his aunt, rather than with any
reference to actual fact. But a man must do a good many mean things when
he devotes himself to the cultivation of a narrow-minded maiden aunt,
for the chance of inheriting small tenements and first-preference bonds
in flourishing railway companies. Roderick Lowther breathed a long sigh
of relief when he left the house that smelt like a tomb behind him,
after drinking a glass of his aunt’s dry sherry, which act of devotion
was in itself no small penance.
He hailed a hansom as soon as he was safely beyond ken of the observant
spinster, and was rattled back to his brother’s lodgings, where he found
Harcourt pondering moodily over the “Times” newspaper, and whence the
same hansom drove the two Antipholi to Stuccoville.
Mr. Tredethlyn was out, but Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home. Harcourt went
into his friend’s study to write a note; while Roderick followed a
servant to the drawing-rooms, in the smallest and cosiest of which three
gorgeous apartments the diplomatist found Maude and Rosa seated side by
side on a low sofa, while proud Julia meditated apart at the window.
“You’re the lady I should like to marry,” thought Roderick, as he looked
at Julia’s dark face, which lighted up for a moment with her flashing
smile, as she bowed to him, and then relapsed into gloom; “there’d be
some pleasure in taming _you_. Who would care to cage a robin? but there
would be some glory in subduing the spirit of an eagle.”
Thus mused Mr. Lowther, while he murmured some commonplace remark upon
the beauty of the summer day, and dropped himself lazily into a seat
near Maude Tredethlyn. He was true to his tactics of the night before,
and addressed his remarks almost entirely to Maude and Julia. When he
did condescend to address the vivacious Rosa, he did so in a manner that
was a delicate admixture of the intellectual bearishness of one of poor
Miss Brontés heroes with the lively banter of a Benedick. The result of
this policy was triumphant, and the market-gardener’s daughter plunged
deeper and deeper still into her five-and-twentieth hopeless attachment.
While Mr. Lowther the elder was cultivating his own interests in the
drawing-room, Mr. Lowther the younger was pacing up and down Francis
Tredethlyn’s study in no happy frame of mind. Imagine the feelings of a
Mephistopheles who begins to suspect that his victim has slipped away
from him. Harcourt was beginning to feel very doubtful as to the
firmness of his hold on his pupil and companion.
Francis Tredethlyn’s conduct for the last few weeks had quite baffled
his friend’s penetration. The Cornishman had grown suddenly preoccupied
and reserved. He might still be seen in the haunts of the Bohemians--for
Mr. Lowther took care that he should not easily extricate himself from
the bonds that he had allowed to be coiled about him; but Francis,