Only a clod
always unwilling to be led into the scenes where he had no pleasure, was
now more unwilling than ever, and Harcourt found it very difficult to
play the game he wanted to play without showing his cards. If it had
been a mere question of plucking so many feathers from an innocent
pigeon, the thing might have been done easily enough, perhaps; but Mr.
Lowther evidently wanted something more than his friend’s golden
plumage. It seemed, indeed, as if he would be satisfied with nothing
less than the utter ruin and degradation of Maude Tredethlyn’s husband.
To-day, walking up and down the study, whose broad plate-glass window
commanded an agreeable view of a stony quadrangle and the roofs and
chimneys of a mews, Harcourt thought very despondently of that grand
scheme to which he had devoted himself so patiently since his return to
England.
“What secret is the fellow hiding from me?” he thought, resentfully; “he
refused to dine with me to-day, and he threw over the party I made for
Greenwich the day before yesterday. He has made no book for the York
summer, and yet he is less at home than ever. What does it all mean? Can
he have gone to the bad in real earnest at last, and without any help
from me? There must be something in it; but what is the something?”
Tired at last of such meditations as these, Harcourt Lowther flung
himself into a chair to compose the letter he had talked about writing
when he entered the study.
He wrote his note, which was very brief, and the gist of which was to
remind Francis of some engagement that would entail the usual champagne
drinking, the usual squandering of money for the gratification of the
worthless society in which a few innocent pigeons abandoned themselves
to be plucked without mercy by every species of predatory fowl. After
having written this little note, so carefully worded that no print of
the fiend’s hoof could have been deciphered therein by uninitiated eyes,
Harcourt Lowther sat with his elbow on the table, biting the feather of
his pen, and ruminating moodily. There were open letters and tradesmen’s
bills lying about upon Francis Tredethlyn’s disorderly writing-table.
Mr. Lowther flung aside his pen presently, and amused himself by a
careless examination of these documents. Some of the bills were heavy
ones, but not so heavy as to make any very serious inroad upon the
Cornishman’s fortune, and Harcourt tossed them away from him one after
the other, uninterested in their details, unconcerned by their
sum-totals, until he came to a dead stop all at once at the first line
of a document which seemed to him to bear an extraordinary significance.
This document was the bill of a fashionable upholsterer, and the line
below the tradesman’s name and address ran thus:
“For goods supplied to Francis Tredethlyn, Esq., at Brook Cottage,
Petersham, June 20th, 185-;” and then followed a list of the furniture
for a cottage, the sum-total of which came to little more than three
hundred pounds.
“So,” muttered Mr. Lowther, “I think I have fallen upon the clue to the
mystery. We will go and look at Mr. Tredethlyn’s furnished cottage.”
He wrote the address on a tablet in his _portemonnaie_, and went
up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he found Roderick intolerably at
his ease in the society of the three ladies. There was an arrangement
made for a meeting in Maude’s roomy box at Covent Garden, to which Mrs.
Tredethlyn was fain to invite the affectionate Rosa, who clung to her
with peculiar fondness to-day: and then the two gentlemen took their
departure; Roderick to look in at the “Travellers’” and the “St.
James’s;” Harcourt to hurry post-haste--or rather hansom-cab haste--to
the Waterloo terminus, whence he took the train for Richmond.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXII.
HARCOURT GATHERS HIS FIRST FRUITS.
The party in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s opera-box that evening was a very
pleasant one. Whatever business had taken Harcourt Lowther to Richmond
must have been tolerably satisfactory in its result, for that
gentleman’s spirits were gayer than usual as he stood behind Maude’s
chair in the shadow of the crimson curtain, talking to her under cover
of all those crashing choruses and grand orchestral effects which
Meyerbeer must surely have composed with a view to comfortable
conversation. Miss Grunderson was gorgeous in thirty guineas worth of
blue moiré antique _à la Watteau_, and exhibited a small fortune in the
way of lace and artificial flowers upon her plump little person. Her
diamond earrings were the biggest in the opera-house; though it must be
confessed that a straw-coloured tint, which the connoisseur repudiates,
pervaded the gems that the market-gardener had bought for his
daughter--size, rather than purity of water, being the quality for which
Mr. Grunderson selected his diamonds. Nothing could be more striking
than the contrast between Maude’s simple toilet of white silk and Rosa’s
gaudy splendour.
But Miss Grunderson was very happy this evening, for the delightful
Roderick condescended to talk to her, while his brother was engrossed by
Mrs. Tredethlyn. He was not very polite, but Rosa thought him positively
charming. She had learnt to understand the emptiness of the attentions
that had been paid to her by enterprising young bachelors, who thought
that an alliance with the great Grunderson’s daughter would be a very
pleasant starting-point on the high-road of life; but she did not
understand that there might come a man wise enough to eschew vain
flatteries and all the ordinary allurements of the vulgar
fortune-hunter, and yet designing enough to spread his nets for any
heiress worthy of his ambition.
In his conversation with the simple-minded Rosa he affected the
sentiments of a confirmed misogynist.
“If there were such a possibility as a sensible woman,” he said, “I
might perhaps hope to end my days in the bosom of a family; but since
the age of miracles is past, I resign myself to the idea of remaining a
lonely wanderer until the day of my death.”
Thus, half in despondency, half in bitterness, Roderick Lowther replied
to some leading remark of Miss Grunderson’s. She called him a horrid man
and a dreadful creature: but she admired him amazingly notwithstanding,
and she felt a seraphic happiness in listening to this delightful
cynical being, to the utter neglect of Meyerbeer.
“With the exception of public characters,” mused the market-gardener’s
daughter, “I don’t think I was ever _really_ in love until now.”
And thus it fell out that, when Mrs. Tredethlyn said, in the course of
the evening, that she was going to spend the following day at
Twickenham, Rosa gave such broad hints about the loveliness of the
weather, and the delights of suburban scenery, that good-natured Maude
promised to take her down for a long afternoon among the roses in the
dear old garden where so much of her own happy youth had been idled
away.
“Are droppers-in to be permitted in your Arcadia, ladies?” demanded
Harcourt; “and will the balls and mallets be considered out of place
upon the lawn by the river?”
This was quite enough for Miss Grunderson, who cried out directly that
of all things in the world she admired croquet, and that “Par” had
bought her a set of Cremer’s most exquisite walnut-wood balls and
mallets. There were times when the vivacious Rosa called her indulgent
parent “Par,” in spite of those half-dozen annual accounts which he had
paid for the young lady’s education.
“I shall so enjoy a game of croquet in a real garden!” cried Rosa. “We
play it in the square sometimes; but the little boys and the bakers’ and
butchers’ young men outside the rails are so dreadfully trying,
especially when the balls won’t go where one wants them, owing to
nervousness; and I’m sure it’s enough to make anybody nervous to have a
strange chimney-sweep calling out, ‘Well done, butter-fingers!’ if one
drops a mallet; and _that_ square-keeper is never within sight when
wanted.”
“Does Tredethlyn go with you to-morrow?” asked Harcourt Lowther
presently; he had been very thoughtful for the last few minutes.
“No,” Maude answered, rather sadly. “I asked Frank to drive me down in
the mail-phaeton; but he told me he was going a little way out of town
on business.”
She was thinking how very great a change had come to pass since her
husband had been her adoring slave, only too happy to follow wherever
she pleased to lead him. Now there was no quarrel, no actual
misunderstanding between them; but there was quite a wide breach, as if
they had agreed to separate after a long series of domestic battles.
“Roderick and I will come down to the Cedars to-morrow,” said Harcourt,
bending over Maude’s chair, “unless you forbid us to do so. The river is
delightful just now, and you may want the services of a couple of
boatmen.”
“We shall be very glad to see you, if you like to come,” Mrs. Tredethlyn
answered, carelessly. Looking up just then, she saw Miss Grunderson’s
round eyes fixed upon her with a very earnest expression. Rosa had heard
all sorts of insinuations respecting Mr. Lowther’s constant attendance
upon Mrs. Tredethlyn, and the young lady was wondering whether her
darling Maude did really deserve any of the reprobation that had been
showered upon her as a flirting matron.
“There’s a way of saying ‘How do you do?’ or ‘Pretty well, thanks,’ that
seems like flirting,” mused Miss Grunderson; “and Mr. Lowther always has
that way when he talks to Mrs. Tredethlyn. I _know_ she is too good to
be a flirt, in spite of all those malicious people may say about her;
and I don’t like Harcourt Lowther a bit, for _he_ must know how his
flirting manner is talked about, though she doesn’t. I’ve seen
half-a-dozen opera-glasses turned this way to-night, just because he’s
been bending over her chair in that whispering way of his. And yet he
has only been talking of croquet.”
Rosa’s friendship was quite as ardent as her love, and much more
lasting. Mrs. Tredethlyn’s gentleness had quite subdued that
affectionate little heart, and the market-gardener’s daughter would have
been willing to make any effort in her friend’s service. She was a very
energetic little girl, with a good deal of that moral courage which is
sometimes wanting in more delicate natures. To put the fact in her own
words, Rosa was able to speak her mind, and to speak it very freely too,
whenever the occasion called for candour.
The next day was one of the brightest in a brilliant July, and Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s shell-shaped barouche was waiting before the ponderous
stuccoed portico at eleven o’clock. Francis had left the house half an
hour before on foot, bent on that mysterious expedition a little way out
of town which he took so frequently now. Maude and Julia came
down-stairs at a quarter after eleven; and Miss Grunderson skipped up
the stone steps two minutes afterwards, with the bluest bonnet and the
pinkest parasol in London.
“How do you like the new contrast?” she inquired, twirling the pink
parasol triumphantly, when she had adjusted her flounces and furbelows
to the best of her ability on the front seat of Mrs. Tredethlyn’s
carriage. “I remember, when I was at school, pink and blue together were
thought bad taste, but now they’re quite _de rigger_. Ness pas ker say
joli dong? s’p’tite ombrelle?” demanded Miss Grunderson, bursting into
French. “Vingt-huit shillings, ma chère! Ness pas trèscher, chère? Et le
boutiquier ne voudrait pas prendre un six-sous là dessous, quoique je
l’ai marchandé comme un juif,” she added, with a slap-dash rendering of
the language which was peculiar to her.
The summer day was delightful, and Maude’s spirits, which had been