Only a clod
even when it could not win her love, had never existed out of her own
imagination. She had been wronged, betrayed, humiliated; while in her
schoolgirl simplicity she had been lamenting her unworthiness of a
devoted husband’s love. She had been bought for money like a slave in
some Oriental market-place, when she had imagined herself a free
sacrifice offered as the recompense of a sacred debt.
She did not speak; but looking at her face Harcourt Lowther saw that his
words had gone home. The breach between husband and wife yawned wide
enough now. The undermining of the ground had been slow, laborious work,
but the result repaid this social engineer for all his trouble. With
what a crash the earth fell in when it was time for the convulsion! So
some huge mass of Kentish chalk, which sappers and miners have been
manipulating for a month or so, and at which a crowd of tired spectators
have been straining hopelessly for two hours at a stretch, breaks away
all at once from the bosom of the cliff with a thunderous noise, and
crumbles into powder.
But Mr. Lowther had not finished yet.
“I thought I could win you back to your husband, Maude, and restore him
to you a better man,” he said; “but I soon discovered how futile such a
hope was. I have been by his side in scenes that were horribly repugnant
to my own nature, in order that I might hold him back from the verge of
deeper gulfs than those into which he had already fallen. Within the
last few months I have known that he kept a secret from me, and I knew
that it must be a disgraceful one. Only a few days ago it came to my
knowledge that he had lately furnished a house somewhere in the suburbs.
This gave me a clue to those mysterious absences, those journeys on
business a little way out of town, about which your husband had been so
reticent. Men of Francis Tredethlyn’s calibre do not furnish houses from
benevolent motives. I had no means of knowing where the house was,--how
little could I imagine that it was in this neighbourhood, or that
accident would lead our footsteps to its very threshold! Mrs.
Tredethlyn, you shall not wring another word from me. I am sorry that
you have tempted me to tell you so much,” exclaimed Mr. Harcourt, who
had said all he wanted to say.
It was a long time before Maude answered him; and then she said, very
slowly, and with a painful effort--
“I thank you--for having told me the truth. It is always best to know
the truth.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXIII.
ROSA’S REVELATIONS.
After this there was no more said between Harcourt Lowther and Mrs.
Tredethlyn upon the subject of her husband’s delinquencies. They walked
slowly back to the stile, where Julia was sitting as quietly as if she
had been that monumental Patience of whom the poet has told us. There is
something wonderfully expressive in natural pantomime; and Miss Desmond,
sitting on that rustic stile tracing figures from Euclid on the dusty
pathway under her feet with the ivory point of her parasol, had yet
contrived to keep a sharp watch upon those two people on the other side
of the meadow, and to form a tolerably clear idea as to the gist of
their conversation.
“Julia dear,” Maude said, wearily, as they walked to the river-side,
“would you mind going back to town as soon as we can get to the
carriage? I have such an intolerable headache, that I’m sure I shall be
quite unfit to dine with papa.”
Of course Julia declared that dining in London or at the Cedars was
equally indifferent to her. It was very often her humour to affect the
dull characterless manner of a paid dependant; and it was her humour to
do so just now.
“I am afraid Mr. Lowther and I have kept you waiting an unconscionable
time,” said Maude, looking at her watch.
“Not at all,” replied Miss Desmond; “I rather like waiting.”
Roderick Lowther and Miss Grunderson were loitering at the little
landing-stage; the young lady’s showy draperies pre-Raffaelite in the
sharp edges which she exhibited against the hot blue sky.
“Oh, you darling Mrs. Tredethlyn!” exclaimed Rosa; “I thought you _never
were_ coming. If your pa is half as particular about his dinner as mine
is, won’t he be cross with us all! It’s close upon seven o’clock!”
Maude looked piteously at Harcourt Lowther. He understood that appealing
glance.
“I have given Mrs. Tredethlyn a violent headache by putting her in an
awningless boat under a broiling sun,” he said, “and then beguiling her
into a fatiguing walk; and I deserve to be horsewhipped for my
stupidity. If you have any regard for your friend’s health, Miss
Grunderson, you will forego the pleasure of dining with Mr. Hillary, and
get her home as quietly as you can.”
Rosa Grunderson might be silly, but she was by no means stupid; and,
looking at Maude’s ashen face, she saw that something more than a
headache had caused the change in her friend. She saw this; and that
vague distrust which she felt about the brother of the man she adored
shaped itself into a positive dislike.
“That Mr. Lowther has been saying something to annoy her,” thought Miss
Grunderson; “and I hate him. What business has he to be always dancing
attendance upon her instead of her husband? And now he’s not content
with getting her talked about, so he must needs go and make her unhappy,
poor darling.”
Thus mused the meditative Rosa, while Roderick Lowther rowed her
homeward over the placid water. The diplomatist’s fascinations were
almost thrown away upon her during this brief journey from Richmond to
the Cedars, although he had progressed so far in Miss Grunderson’s
affections during a leisurely promenade on the terrace, that he had
serious thoughts of calling on Grunderson _père_ within the week to make
a formal offer for the young lady’s hand and fortune.
“I have no idea of wasting my time and trouble upon the girl, to find
myself thrown out at the last moment by the impracticable parent,”
thought Roderick, as he shot through the water with that long deliberate
stroke for which the Oxonians are celebrated. “I must know exactly where
I am, before I devote myself to the plump Rosa. There must be no
nonsense about settlements and so forth. I won’t have any legal brick
wall and _chevaux de frise_ between me and my wife’s fortune. A man
doesn’t quarter a cabbage with the arms of the oldest untitled family in
Hampshire without getting well paid for the humiliation. I must
understand what I’m going in for, when I propose to my charming Rosa.”
Lionel Hillary was in the drawing-room when the water-party returned to
the Cedars; but he accepted his daughter’s assurance that she was too
tired and too ill to dine with him, and escorted her to her carriage as
soon as it was ready for her. Maude was quite composed now, and there
was no suspicion of the truth aroused in the merchant’s mind when he
kissed her and bade her good-bye.
“It was foolish of you to go on the water in the hottest part of the
day, darling,” he said; “and I’m afraid you are going out a little too
much in town; but the season will soon be over, and I suppose you will
be leaving London.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn murmured something unintelligible, and the barouche
rolled away. She saw her father and the two Lowthers standing on the
wide stone steps dimly through a mist, athwart which the group seemed
only a confusion of familiar faces and dark garments; and then she found
herself driving Londonwards through the still evening, with Julia by her
side, and Rosa’s anxious face opposite to her.
She accepted unquestioningly all that Harcourt Lowther had told her. Her
husband was false to her. There was so much in Francis Tredethlyn’s life
since his marriage which seemed an evidence of his accuser’s truth. And
then Harcourt had not wished to accuse. The cruel revelation had been
extorted from him. No trouble that Maude had ever yet endured had been
so bitter as that which had come upon her to-day,--the shame, the
humiliation, the unutterable horror of that discovery made in the summer
sunshine, amidst the perfume of flowers, the joyous carolling of a
skylark high up in the warm blue sky. She did not love her husband; and
the agony which gnawed her breast during this homeward journey was the
sharp pang which belongs to wounded pride rather than to betrayed
affection. At least this was what she said to herself, as she
remembered, with an angry flush upon her brow, those sneering remarks of
Mr. Lowther’s about her love for such a man as Francis Tredethlyn.
“I do believe he loved me once, let Harcourt Lowther say what he will;
and he was nobly generous to my father; and now he deserts me
altogether, and devotes himself to some horrible woman!” thought Mrs.
Tredethlyn, whose ideas were not particularly sequential this evening.
She meditated upon so much as she knew of the life that Francis had led
since the close of his honeymoon. His late hours, his frequent absences,
all seemed to confirm Harcourt’s account of dissipated habits and
degraded tastes.
Yes, everything combined to prove the miserable truth. She was a
neglected wife; abandoned by the man who had once seemed the veriest
slave that ever bowed beneath the supreme dominion of Love. She
remembered what he had been, or what she had believed him to be, and was
all the more indignant with him for the discoveries of to-day. Rosa
Grunderson, anxiously watching Mrs. Tredethlyn in the twilight, wondered
that so dark a cloud could overshadow the fair face of her friend.
“It must be something very dreadful,” thought Rosa; “but whatever it is,
that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it. If Roderick does
propose,--which I’ve every reason to think he will, from the way he
conducted himself on the terrace,--and he and pa can come to any
arrangement about me, I won’t have much to do with my brother-in-law,
that’s certain, for I hate him. But I dare say those horrid ground-rents
will always stand in the way of my being married to anybody but a
Rothschild; and Rothschilds don’t trouble _themselves_ about
ground-rents.”
The drive from Twickenham to Stuccoville is not a very long one; and
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bays got over the ground at a pace that did credit to
the judgment of Mr. Lowther, who had chosen the horses for his friend.
It was nearly nine o’clock when the barouche drew up before the Doric
colonnade which imparted a funereal darkness to Maude’s dining-room; and
before the three ladies could alight, a hansom cab dashed up to the
kerbstone, a pair of slamming doors were flung open, and Francis
Tredethlyn sprang out upon the pavement.
His wife’s face flushed crimson, and then grew deadly pale. She turned
to Rosa Grunderson, and murmured in faint, broken accents: “Will you
dine with us, Rosa? or shall Martin drive you home?”
“Thank you, darling,” Miss Grunderson answered promptly; “I think I’ll
come in for just a few moments. Pa will have gone to the Bell and--to
his club by this time,” added Rosa, whose parent was wont to spend his
evenings in the parlour of a very respectable tavern in the Brompton
Road, where he and several other worthies assembled nightly to discuss
the affairs of the nation amidst the fumes of their cigars, the
primitive clay being strictly tabooed in that select little coterie.
Maude alighted and entered the hall. Francis had handed her from the
carriage, and followed her into the house. He threw away his cigar as he
stepped into the hall, and approached his wife radiant with good spirits
and perfumed with tobacco.
“I’m so glad you’ve come home,” he said. “I thought you were going to
dine with the governor, and that I should have to sit in that dreary
room all by myself, with only Landseer’s staghounds to keep me company;