Only a clod
though if half the people one calls company were as much alive as _they_
are, a dinner-party wouldn’t be such a dismal business as it is. Of
course you haven’t dined; no more have I; and unfortunately there
doesn’t seem to be any dinner,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, as he opened the
door and looked into the dining-room, where the table was blank and
ghastly under a faint glimmer of gas. “No one was expected, I suppose?
However, they can get us something. Geoffreys, just see about dinner,
will you? How do you do, Miss Grunderson? I dare say you’re hungry after
your drive. Are you going up-stairs, Maude?”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn. The syllable had a startling effect as
it fell from her lips, like one solitary drop of hail falling suddenly
on a summer day.
“I am going up-stairs,” said Miss Desmond confidentially to Rosa; “will
you come with me, and take off your things?”
“No, thanks, dear,” answered Miss Grunderson, who would have endured
tortures rather than say “thank you,” when fashion required that she
should say “thanks.” “I don’t think I _will_ take off my things. Mrs.
Tredethlyn doesn’t seem very well; and it’s almost too late for dinner;
so I think I’ll just go up to the morning-room, and rest for a few
minutes before I go home. The carriage needn’t be kept, you know,
please,” added Miss Grunderson, to a male domestic hovering in the
shadowy depths of the hall; “for I can have a cab fetched when I want to
go.”
Mr. Tredethlyn had followed his wife to the drawing-room; and the two
girls standing at the foot of the staircase heard one of the doors close
with a sonorous bang.
Miss Desmond went up-stairs, and Miss Grunderson followed slowly. The
morning-room of which Rosa had spoken was on the second floor; but the
young lady did not go any farther than the first landing-place. The door
of the front drawing-room was closed, but the doors of the back
drawing-room stood wide open; and peering into the lighted apartment,
Rosa saw that it was quite empty. She paused for a moment, looked about
her; and then went quietly into the back drawing-room, and closed the
door very softly behind her.
Francis Tredethlyn followed his wife to the drawing-room because that
one frozen syllable, together with the strange expression of her face,
had been quite enough to tell him that something was wrong. This husband
and this wife had never quarrelled. There had been between them none of
those little stormy passages which are apt to interrupt the serenity of
the best-regulated households; and the Cornishman’s heart turned cold
with the thought that anything like ill-feeling could arise between
himself and Maude. The altered expression of her face boded so much; and
yet what could arise to displease her, when he was nothing but her
devoted slave, ready to obey her commands, willing to lay down his very
life for her pleasure?
“Maude,” he said, as he closed the drawing-room door, “you speak to me
and look at me as if you were offended. And yet I have no consciousness
of having done anything to displease you.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn looked at her husband with supreme contempt; not the
cool scorn which is akin to indifference, but rather a passionate
disdainfulness. Taking into consideration the fact that Maude did not
care for her husband, all this feminine rage seemed a sad waste of
feeling.
“Do not add hypocrisy to the wrong you have done me,” said Mrs.
Tredethlyn. “I have been most cruelly awakened this day to a knowledge
of the life you have been leading--ever since our marriage. I cannot
speak of this subject; it is too horrible; I think the words would choke
me. I thought that I should have been able to write what I had to tell
you; but since I have been so unfortunate as to meet you, I may as well
say with my own lips what I meant to have said in a letter. It is very
little. I have only to tell you that from this moment we must be
strangers to each other. After my discoveries of to-day, I should
consider myself a base and degraded creature if I ever suffered your
hand to touch mine in friendship again. The obligation of my father’s
debt to you must rest upon him henceforward, and not upon me.”
“But, Maude, explain yourself!--your discovery of to-day, you say! What
discovery?”
“Your affectation of unconsciousness is a deeper insult than your----No,
I will _not_ discuss this subject with you!” cried Maude, passionately.
“It is shameful--it is cruel--that I should have been wronged so basely,
when I trusted you so completely. Do not speak to me; do not touch me!”
she exclaimed, shrinking away from him with a shudder; “your presence
inspires me with disgust and abhorrence. Why do you make any poor
pretence of inhabiting this house, which has only afforded you an
ostensible shelter, while your amusements and your friends have been
found elsewhere? I set you free from this hour, Mr. Tredethlyn. Seek for
happiness after your own fashion; where you please. I have nothing more
to say to you.”
She swept from the room before her husband could arrest her. Unspeakably
bewildered by her passionate words, which were almost meaningless to
him, Francis Tredethlyn stood motionless as a statue a few paces from
the doorway by which his wife had just left him. He was standing thus
when the voluminous curtains which were drawn across the archway between
the drawing-rooms were cautiously divided, and a plump little figure in
blue muslin appeared among the amber drapery. The Cornishman heard the
rustling, and turned abruptly towards the _portière_.
“Yes,” exclaimed Miss Grunderson, “it’s me; no, it’s I!--but, goodness
gracious, what _does_ it matter about grammar, when there’s so much
trouble in the world?--yes, and I’ve been listening,” continued the
young lady, answering Mr. Tredethlyn’s inquiring stare; “and I know that
listening in a general way is considered mean; but I think the amount of
pa’s ground-rents ought to exempt me from any imputation of meanness. If
I didn’t love that sweet lamb so dearly; and if I hadn’t a very sincere
regard for you, Mr. Tredethlyn,--having come into money suddenly myself,
and knowing how trying it is to carry it off carelessly, and not look as
if one was always conscious of being richer than other people;--if I
didn’t--in short, I shouldn’t have stopped behind those curtains,--and
run the risk of being considered a sneak and a listener. But do say that
you forgive me, please, and believe that I meant it for the best?”
pleaded Rosa, whose diction was apt to become rather obscure under the
influence of excitement.
“What, in Heaven’s name, does it all mean, Miss Grunderson?” asked
Francis, piteously.
He was ready to cling to the frailest spar by which he might float on
the wide ocean of perplexity, whose billows had so suddenly encompassed
him.
“Goodness gracious knows--_I_ don’t any more than the dead though if
there _is_ anything in drawing-room tables balancing themselves on
tip-toe and great-coats flying about the room like awkward birds the
dead may know more than we give them credit for,” exclaimed the lively
Rosa, without a single stop; “but it’s very certain there is something
wrong, and whatever it is, that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it.”
“Harcourt Lowther?”
“Yes. My pa hears a great deal of gossip at the Bell and--at clubs, and
such places; and he always tells me everything he hears. And oh, Mr.
Tredethlyn, if you knew how long I have wished to speak my mind to you,
I am sure you would forgive me for listening just now.”
“My dear Miss Grunderson, what could you have to say to me?” asked the
bewildered Cornishman.
“Oh, lots of things. But then you know the grand maxim in society is
that you _mustn’t_ speak your mind. It’s like that Latin person’s rule
of nil thingamy; you mustn’t admire any thing, you know; and so on. And
one must unlearn all one’s Catechism, about loving one’s neighbour as
oneself, and doing unto others as one would they should--which always
reminds me of a winter Sunday afternoon at school and broken chilblains,
because one _did_ break once while I was saying it. And you see in
society the thing is to let your neighbour go his way and to go yours,
and to say, ‘Bless my soul! exactly as I anticipated; paw creatchaw!’ if
your neighbour tumbles over a precipice, from which it would be the very
worst of bad manners to hold him back; and in society, if you saw the
good Samaritan--no, the other person--lying wounded in the road, it
would be a dreadful _incon_--what it’s name?--to pick him up and take
him to an inn and pay for his lodging, because he might call you to
account for your impertinent officiousness as soon as he got well. So,
though I have been bursting to speak my mind almost ever since I’ve
known you, Mr. Tredethlyn, I’ve held my tongue until to-night. But
to-night the climax has come, and I _must_ speak. Oh, you poor dear
thing!” cried Rosa, in a sudden outburst of sympathy, “how you and your
wife have been talked about!”
“Talked about!--by whom, when, and where?”
“By everybody, always, everywhere. You don’t know--though you ought to
know, if you ever listened to what was going on around you--how people
_do_ talk. They’ve talked about your dissipation, the hours you have
kept, the places you have been seen at, the people you have been seen
with; about your coming home in hansom cabs in the middle of the night;
and I think if quieter vehicles could be invented for people who stay
out late, or at least the doors made to open differently, there wouldn’t
_be_ so much scandal. They’ve talked about your getting _tipsy_,”
exclaimed Rosa, shaking her head solemnly, and laying a tremendous
stress upon the obnoxious word; “and they’ve said you were drinking
yourself into an early grave, and that Harcourt Lowther was leading you
on to your death in order that he might marry your wife afterwards.”
“Harcourt lead me--to my death--and--marry Maude! Oh, no, no, no; it is
too horrible!” gasped Francis, staring at Miss Grunderson, with his head
clasped in his hands, and big beads of perspiration upon his brow.
“I know it is,” answered Rosa; “but they say it; and you must own it was
not a wise thing for you to be so very intimate with a man who was
engaged to your wife before you married her.”
“Engaged to my wife! _Who_ was engaged to my wife?”
“Why, Harcourt Lowther, of course! Didn’t you know all about it?”
“No, so help me Heaven!”
Miss Grunderson looked very grave. All that she had said had been spoken
in perfect good faith; but, all at once, she began to see that mischief
might come of this free utterance of her thoughts.
“I thought that you knew it,” she stammered in considerable confusion,
“or I’m sure I should never have said one word about----”
“How did _you_ come to know it?” asked Francis, turning fiercely upon
the terrified Rosa.
“Miss Desmond told me.”
“It is a lie, a malicious lie, invented by Julia Desmond!”
“I dare say it _is_ something in the way of a story,” responded Miss
Grunderson, who was very anxious to extinguish the sudden conflagration
which her unconscious hand had fired; “people _do_ tell such stories,
you know; not that I think Miss Desmond would speak so positively
unless--but I’m sure if Mrs. Tredethlyn _was_ ever engaged to Mr.
Lowther, she had quite forgotten him when she married you; only _if_ it
was so, I don’t think it was quite honourable of him to be so friendly
with you without telling you all about it.”
Thus Miss Grunderson--floundering helplessly in a conversational
quagmire--endeavoured to undo any mischief which her indiscretion might
have made. But Francis was not listening to her; he was thinking of all
his life during the last year, and a host of trifling circumstances
recurred to his mind, in evidence against the wife he had loved, and the
friend he had trusted.