Only a clod
a dimly-lighted shop-window; none of the pleasant struggles, the proud
triumphs, which attend the collection of Poverty’s art and _virtu_, had
attended the decoration of this splendid chamber. The Cornishman had
given _carte blanche_ to his friend, and had written cheques--whose
figures he had not remembered five minutes after writing them--in favour
of a celebrated dealer in Bond Street, and an upholsterer in Oxford
Street; and that was all. He smiled bitterly now as he paused to look
round the room before he left it--perhaps for ever.
“And this has been my home,” he thought. “Home! Better to sit by my
uncle Oliver’s miserly fire, in the dreary house on the Cornish moors,
than to loll in one of those yellow-satin chairs, playing at ball with a
gold snuff-box, and watching the traitor whom I have trusted talking to
my wife.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE LADY AT PETERSHAM.
The letter which Francis Tredethlyn wrote in his study was a long one; a
very painful one to write, as it seemed, from the face of the writer,
and the weary sigh which every now and then escaped from his lips, as
his hurrying pen paused for a moment. It was close upon ten o’clock when
he began the letter. The clock chimed the half-hour after eleven while
he was sealing it. He addressed the envelope, and then threw himself
back in his chair to think. He had so much to think of. Maude’s
extraordinary conduct, Rosa Grunderson’s revelation, had overthrown the
whole fabric of his life; and he found himself surrounded by ruins whose
utter chaos he could not contemplate without bewilderment.
For the last few weeks his thoughts had been almost exclusively devoted
to his cousin Susan, and her wrongs. Found at last, after so many
failures and disappointments, so much delay, the lonely girl had been
welcomed as tenderly as any wanderer who ever returned to the lost
friends of his youth. But Susan Lesley had a sad story to tell her
cousin. The missing link in the chain that Francis Tredethlyn had put
together piece by piece was the letter which had been written from St.
Petersburg by the man whom Susan had loved and trusted--the man whose
diary had revealed to Francis the utter worthlessness of his character.
Robert Lesley’s letter was only a worthy companion to Robert Lesley’s
diary. In it he coldly and deliberately told the girl who loved him,
that she was not his wife; that the Marylebone marriage was no marriage;
the registrar no recognized official, but a scoundrel hired for a
twenty-pound note to play the part of that functionary; that the
registrar’s office had been no office, but a lodging-house parlour hired
for the occasion, and half-a-dozen doors from the real office. This
statement was, of course, accompanied by the usual heartless sophistries
which run so glibly from the pen, or fall so smoothly from the lips, of
an utterly heartless man. The self-confessed betrayer pleaded the
madness of an all-absorbing love; the stern necessities of well-bred
poverty; the pressure of family circumstances; the fear of a father’s
rage; and then, in conclusion, the writer stated the pitiful stipend
which he was prepared to offer to the woman he had abandoned, and the
child he had disowned.
Susan showed her cousin this letter, and told him how, after receiving
it, her mind had almost given way under the burden of her great agony.
Then it was that she had gone to Mrs. Burfield, and had written to her
father a long letter, telling him something of her story, but not all;
appealing piteously to the only friend to whom she could appeal; for
faithful Frank was far away in some unknown country. She told her cousin
how she had waited, at first with a faint sickly hope, then with a blank
despair, for some answer from the father to whom she had appealed. But
none came; and when her little stock of money had sunk to its lowest
ebb, she left the dull quiet of Coltonslough to begin a weary, lonely
struggle for bread, which had endured, without one ray of sunlight to
illumine its blank misery, until the summer Sunday afternoon on which
Francis Tredethlyn found her sitting in the nurse’s cottage with her boy
in her arms.
It was so sad a story, and so sadly common, that there is little need to
dwell upon the unvarnished record of a woman’s battle with poverty in
the heart of a great city.
“Perhaps I ought to think myself very happy, Francis,” Susan said when
she had told her story; “for I was always able to pay the nurse somehow
for her care of my darling; and the deadly fear of not being able to do
_that_ was the worst trouble I knew in all that dreary time. I have been
face to face with starvation, Frank, very often within the last two
years; but it is not so terrible, when one is used to it. The help
always came at last, and some friendly hand, so unexpected that it might
have dropped down from heaven, has often come between me and despair. I
have sometimes thought that bitter struggle for my daily bread was only
a blessing in disguise, for it kept me from brooding upon my great
sorrow; it sometimes shut from me the thought of Robert’s cruelty and my
own disgrace.”
“Disgrace!” cried the Cornishman; “no, Susan, there is no shadow of
disgrace upon you except the disgrace of being united to a scoundrel and
a liar. The marriage before the registrar was a _bonâ fide_ marriage, as
binding as if it had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
And then Francis told Susan of his visit to the registrar’s office. This
was the balm which he was able to pour into the deepest wound that ever
tortured a woman’s heart. But the identity of the husband who had lied
in denouncing himself a liar was entirely unknown to Susan. In all the
familiar intercourse of the brief period in which the trusting girl had
been a petted and happy wife, Robert Lesley had not let fall one
careless word relating in the remotest way to his position in life, his
family, or his prospects. When first consulted by Francis upon the
contents of the diary, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon had instituted an
inquiry as to whether a Mr. Robert Lesley had been inscribed on the
books of St. Boniface any time between 1845 and 1852; and the answer had
been in the negative. No person of the name had been a member of that
college within the last ten years. Francis could only conclude,
therefore, that Mrs. Burfield had been right in her supposition that the
man calling himself Robert Lesley had shielded his identity under a
false name.
“But your husband was visited by his brother, was he not, Susan?” said
Mr. Tredethlyn, when this subject was discussed between the cousins.
“Yes; but I knew no more of Robert’s brother than of Robert himself. He
did not come to us often. I heard that he was a lawyer,--a barrister, I
think,--and that he lived in the Temple. I heard even that by accident,
and Robert seemed almost vexed that I should know so much.”
All these trifling circumstances seemed to point inevitably to one
conclusion; Robert Lesley had intended from the first to abandon his
wife, whenever his own interests rendered it advisable that he should
throw off the tie that bound him to her. Love and selfishness go very
badly hand-in-hand together; and love had soon left selfishness sole
master of the field.
“But this man shall be made to acknowledge his wife,--to give a name to
his child,” cried Francis, “if he can be found.”
If he could be found: that was the grand question. But Mr. Tredethlyn
was quite at a loss with regard to the means by which his cousin’s
husband was to be found. In this case even the grand medium by which the
lost are restored to the arms of their friends--the second column of the
“Times”--could be of no avail; for what is the use of advertising for a
man who does not want to reveal himself?
“If my husband is alive, Providence may throw him across my path some
day,” Susan said, resignedly. “He could not be more dead to me than he
is now if he were buried in the deepest grave that ever held the ashes
of the lost; but if he gave my boy the name that is his right, I think I
could forgive him all the wrong he has done me.”
It was quite in vain that Francis Tredethlyn sought to carry his cousin
and her son home to his own house. The sorrowful young mother shrank
with absolute terror from the idea of encountering strangers, of finding
herself in a splendid house amongst happy people.
“I am used to my poverty, Francis,” she said;--“let me be poor still.
Nobody is inquisitive about me, because I am beneath people’s curiosity.
No one questions me about the husband who has deserted me, or extorts my
story from me only to doubt it when it is told. My father would not
believe me; can I expect strangers to be more trusting than he was? No,
Francis; leave me alone in my obscurity. I have a lodging near here, and
I can see my darling every day. I will freely accept from you a little
income which will enable me to live as I have lived, without working as
hard as I have worked; but I will accept no more. I am delighted to
think that my father left his fortune to you, Frank; and I thank and
bless you for having taken so much trouble to find me out.”
Francis Tredethlyn found it hard work to win Susan away from this
determination, so quietly expressed. But he did at last persuade her to
agree to his own plans for her life, on condition that he should tell
Maude nothing, nor ask Susan to meet her until the missing husband was
found, and compelled to acknowledge his wife and son. Francis consented
to promise this; but he cherished a hope that Susan would relent
by-and-by, when she heard more of Maude’s tender and amiable nature, and
that he would be able to win his wife’s friendship for the simple
country girl who had played with him amongst the daisies in Landresdale
churchyard.
“You must accept the home I shall prepare for you, Susy,” said Francis,
“or I will have a deed of gift drawn up to-morrow, transferring half my
fortune to you. I am ready to divide your father’s wealth with you as
soon as ever I understand your legal position. In the meantime let me
have the sweetest pleasure my money has ever given me yet--the pleasure
of making a happy home for you and my little kinsman. If you knew how I
have wasted that hoarded money, Susy, on racecourses, and all kinds of
worthless places,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, with a remorseful recollection
of one particular brand of Moselle, for which he had been wont to pay
fourteen shillings a bottle in the purlieus of the Haymarket.
Susan consented to let her cousin do what he liked with regard to the
place in which she was to live henceforward. What mother could refuse a
bright home for the child she loves? A few words from Francis conjured
up the vision of a garden, where the boy could play under the shadow of
lilacs and laburnums; where the summer breeze would waft the petals of
overblown roses around that golden head. From the happy moment in which
he urged the child’s welfare as an argument against the mother, Francis
Tredethlyn’s triumph was secured. Susan pondered. She thought of the
sweet country air, the bright rooms, with the fresh breath of morning
blowing in at the open windows, the garden, the cow, the chickens, and
all the joys of that sweet rustic paradise which town-bred children hear
of from their mother’s lips, and see only in their dreams. Susan
hesitated. Francis had made friends with the boy by this time, and had
enlisted the child on his side of the argument. When the woman’s
sorrowful pride began to hold out weakly, when the mother’s heart showed
symptoms of relenting, the child’s little chubby arms crept round her
neck, and the child’s tiny voice pleaded in her ear: