Only a clod
here, and do not know the lady.”
Maude did not answer him just then. She walked on a little faster than
before; and Harcourt kept by her side, looking furtively every now and
then at the pale profile, the tremulous lower lip. He could see that
Mrs. Tredethlyn was profoundly agitated, and that she was trying to
conceal her agitation. He could see this; and he was determined to make
her speak, and speak freely.
“She is not the sort of woman to suffer in silence,” he thought. “This
kind of trouble is new to her, and she will cry out presently.”
Mr. Lowther was not very much at fault in his estimate of Maude’s
heroism. She spoke to him when they were a few paces from Julia, whose
face was lighted by a look of triumph under her gauzy veil.
“You say you do not know that lady. You must at least know who she is?”
This was said in a tone of almost piteous entreaty.
“Upon my honour, no,” Harcourt answered, gravely.
There was a pause for some moments. They were in one of the meadows by
this time, nearing the water’s edge, Julia still in the rear, and Maude
still walking very fast, as it is the habit of most people to walk under
the influence of agitation. Perhaps in that unreasoning, unnecessary
haste, there lurks a vague fancy that we can hurry _away_ from our
trouble.
All at once Maude turned to Harcourt Lowther and laid her hand upon his
arm.
“Tell me what it all means,” she cried,--“tell me the worst, however bad
it is. I know that you are hiding something from me. I know by your
manner just now that there is some horrible meaning in Frank’s presence
in that garden with that woman.”
“My dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, you ask me to interfere in a matter which I
have no right to approach. It may be everything to you where your
husband goes,--whom he associates with. I have been his friend,--for
your sake; and I have done my best to steer him clear of dangerous
acquaintance and dangerous amusements--still for your sake. I may have
found it a hard matter to keep him out of mischief, and may have
regretted the natural tendencies of his character--always for your sake.
Beyond this I can have nothing to do with him. I had good reason for
being sorry when you married him--on my own account. Of late I have been
even more sorry--on yours.”
Maude looked at him, white and trembling. The schemer was pleased to see
what deadly mischief had been done, and yet stung to the very heart to
find that any falsehood of his victim’s could wound so deeply. There are
triumphs which have a shadow of humiliation upon their brightness, and
this was one of them. Julia, seeing that her companions were loitering,
seated herself on the lower step of a stile. She had no desire to
interrupt this conversation.
“Speak to me plainly,” Mrs. Tredethlyn cried, passionately, “or I will
go back to that cottage and ask my husband himself for an explanation.
Perhaps that would be best. He has a better right to explain his conduct
than any one else.”
She walked a few paces from her companion; but Harcourt Lowther followed
her, and caught her gently by the arm.
“Will Francis Tredethlyn tell you the truth if you question him?” he
asked. “My dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, how could you endure the _esclandre_ of
such a scene as _must_ ensue if you go back to that house, and confront
your husband in the presence of that woman?”
“Why should there be a scene, or any _esclandre_? The lady may be the
wife or daughter of some friend of my husband’s. Have I any right to
imagine something horrible because I see Frank with a person who is a
stranger to me? It was only your manner that frightened me.”
“I am very sorry my manner was so foolish. Let us drop the subject.
Only--take my advice--don’t go back to that house.”
“Why should I not, if my husband is innocent? as I am sure he is.”
Mr. Lowther shrugged his shoulders.
“Because it is an unpleasant thing to intrude where one is not invited,”
he answered. “Whatever questions you wish to ask your husband can be
reserved until you are both at home; and in the meantime pray let the
matter drop. Believe me, it is not a fit subject for discussion between
you and me.”
There are lawyers who generally inaugurate a consultation by advising
their clients not to go to law. They know it is a very safe display of
magnanimity. It is only the old story of standing on the shore to reason
with a tempestuous ocean, or interfering with the appetite of a famished
wolf in favour of the lamb on which he means to dine. To try to restrain
a woman whose jealousy has once been aroused from any investigation of
her fancied wrongs, is no less wasted labour; and Harcourt Lowther knew
quite enough of human nature to be very sure of this.
Mrs. Tredethlyn turned upon him fiercely. He had never seen the woman he
loved in a passion until this moment; and though he had so much else to
employ his thoughts just now, he could not help pausing for a moment to
think now beautiful she looked with that new light in her eyes, that
feverish glow so suddenly kindled in the cheeks that had been deadly
pale.
“I will not let the matter drop,” she cried. “You are keeping some
hideous secret hidden from me. I know you are. I could not be mistaken
in your tone just now when you saw Francis in that garden. If there were
no harm in his being there, why should you express such amazement?
Harcourt Lowther, we were friends once, and you affect to be my friend
now. If you are what you pretend to be, tell me the meaning of my
husband’s conduct?”
“You love him very much, Maude, to feel his conduct so deeply.”
She was too agitated to notice that her old lover had called her by her
Christian name. He had perhaps been scarcely aware of it himself. He
loved her better at this moment than he had ever loved her in his life,
now that she stood before him a beautiful, angry, passionate creature,
appealing to him against the husband for whose sake he had been jilted.
“You must be very much in love with your husband,” he repeated,
bitterly; “and yet I should have scarcely thought it possible you could
care for that sort of person.”
“He _is_ my husband,” answered Maude, “and I have a right to be angry if
he does any wrong.”
“I acknowledge your right to be as angry as you please, but I am sorry
to see you so agitated. I am very sorry we happened to walk this way.”
“Will you tell me the truth? I have appealed to you by our old
friendship. I shall never again believe in you as a friend unless you
speak plainly to-day.”
“If you say _that_, you oblige me to speak. Will you take my arm, and
walk up and down by the hedge yonder? I see people coming into the
meadow, and we look rather conspicuous standing just here.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn accepted the proffered arm. Harcourt Lowther was silent
for some moments, while they strolled slowly under the shadow of a tall
hawthorn hedge. He was waiting until Maude should have recovered some
little calmness, and be in a condition to appreciate the full value of
what he was going to say.
“It would be going over very old ground, and awakening very bitter
recollections--on my part, at least,” he began at last, in a subdued and
pensive tone, “were I to tell you what I thought of your marriage with
Francis Tredethlyn. When I thought of it most mildly, I believed it the
maddest sacrifice that was ever made to the Moloch Wealth since this
world began. You had your reasons, you told me, and they were very
powerful reasons, but they were to be kept a secret. I had no more to
say. All I could do was to hope that you might not be utterly miserable
with the man you married--to my mind, the man of all others least
adapted to make you a happy wife. I should have done well had I been
wise enough to keep aloof from you and your husband after that unhappy
marriage. I was so mad as to hang about your house, and accept the
friendship of my rival, in the belief that I might save the vessel
wherein you had embarked from some of those rocks which I saw a little
ahead of the calm bay whence you sailed, with all the stereotyped
paraphernalia of pennants flying and guns firing. I _have_ saved you
from a good deal; but I have not been able to change your husband’s
nature, and he has taken his own way in spite of me.”
“What do you mean?” Maude demanded, breathlessly.
“I cannot, and will not, enter into the details of Francis Tredethlyn’s
life for the last twelve months. No, Maude, not even your entreaties
shall wring from me more than I have a right to tell, or you to hear.
And if I spoke the plainest words that ever sullied a woman’s ear, I
should only be talking a strange language which would convey no meaning
to your innocent mind. There are places in London whose names you have
never heard in your life--places whose very existence might never be
known to honest people, if men did not write about them in the
newspapers; and amongst the _habitués_ of those places your husband has
been conspicuous since the first week of his return from the village
where you and he spent your honeymoon. There are dinners given, up at
that hotel yonder, to women whose costume is an extravagant copy of
yours, but who in everything except their dress differ from you as
entirely as darkness differs from light; and Francis Tredethlyn has been
foremost amongst the dinner-givers ever since he has had a fortune to
squander. So long as he was amused by open follies and dissipations I
cherished a lingering hope that custom would bring weariness, and that
the very monotony of these poisonous pleasures would render them their
own antidote. I made excuses for the man who had so newly succeeded to a
fortune large enough to intoxicate a weak brain; and I fancied when the
novelty of his wealth had ceased to bewilder him, he would awake to a
bitter sense of the degrading path in which he was treading. I thought
this, Maude, and I believed also that your loveliness, your purity,
rendered all the more obvious by contrast with the people among whom he
wasted his life, must lure him back to your side. How could I think
otherwise than this?--_I_, who had loved and lost you!”
It never occurred to Mrs. Tredethlyn that these were the very last words
that Harcourt Lowther should have spoken to her, at this moment above
all other moments. It seemed as if she scarcely heard this allusion to
the past, any more than she had heard her old lover’s frequent utterance
of her Christian name.
“I think my husband loved me--once,” she murmured in a low sorrowful
voice. “He was so noble in his conduct--so generous to my father.”
“My poor girl,” exclaimed Harcourt, with supreme compassion, “how should
_you_ know the difference between a good man’s generosity and a
profligate’s lavish bid for the fair young bride who happens to be the
fancy of a moment? There are men who will give as exaggerated a price
for a picture as ever Francis Tredethlyn offered when he won you for his
wife; but you would scarcely call a man ‘generous’ because he bid
extravagantly for a Raffaelle or a Murillo at Christie’s. There is no
creature in this world so selfish as a profligate.”
Maude turned sick and cold to the very heart as Mr. Lowther said this.
A profligate! The horrible word wounded her like the stroke of a knife.
In a moment this innocent girl, who until now had only known the
existence of “profligacy” as an unspeakable noun substantive hidden away
somewhere in the close columns of unexpurgated dictionaries, felt the
veil rudely torn from the purity of her mind; and was told that her
husband--the other part of herself, united to her by the solemn service
of the Church--was the obnoxious thing which until this hour no one had
ever dared to name in her presence. The generosity she had believed in
was a sham. The noble nature which had commanded her regard and esteem,