Only a clod
“Peese, mammy, do live in the pooty house, and let Wobert have pooty
flowers.”
It was the triumph of infantine oratory. Susan turned to her kinsman,
half laughing, half crying, and gave him her hand.
“You must do as you like, cousin Frank,” she said. “Whatever is best for
Robert must be best for me.”
Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn had withdrawn himself in a great
measure from the society of Mr. Lowther, while he scoured the prettiest
suburbs in search of a home for his cousin, and superintended the
necessary improvements and decoration, the selection of the simple
furniture, the arrangement of a garden, in which Robert Lesley’s son
might play happily, his life undarkened by the baseness of an unknown
father. There had been unspeakable pleasure for the Cornishman in the
doing of this work. It was so long since he had been of use to any one;
it was so long since his supremest benevolence to his fellow-men had
taken any higher form than the payment of a dinner-bill, and a handsome
bonus to the waiter. He seemed to breathe a new atmosphere, a fresher,
purer air, when he shook himself clear of Harcourt Lowther’s society,
and spent a summer’s day pottering amongst carpenters and house-painters
in the Petersham cottage. The odour of turpentine and lead did not give
him a headache; it was almost invigorating after the stifling fumes of
musk and mock-turtle, patchouli, and devilled whitebait that had
pervaded the hotel dining-rooms in which he had so often acted as host.
Energetic though Mr. Tredethlyn was in the carrying out of his
arrangements, Susan had been established little more than a week at the
cottage, and the paint on the Venetian shutters was still rather sticky,
when Harcourt Lowther found the upholsterer’s bill, which gave him the
clue to his pupil’s mysterious conduct. To hasten down to Petersham,
find the cottage, refresh himself with dry sherry and soda-water at the
nearest tavern, and to make himself agreeably familiar with the landlord
of the tavern, was all incomparably easy to Mr. Lowther. From the
landlord he heard all about Brook Cottage. How it had been to let for
nearly a twelvemonth; how it had been taken all in a hurry at the end of
May by a dashing-looking gentleman from town, who had been reported
scouring the neighbourhood in hansom cabs, inquiring for houses to let,
for three days at a stretch; how painters and glaziers, carpenters and
gardeners, had set to work in hot haste to renew and revivify everything
in-doors and out; how waggon-loads of the finest gravel from Wimbledon,
and cartloads of the softest turf from Ham, had been laid down in the
garden; how furniture, that was every bit of it new, had been brought
down from London; how the tall, dashing, energetic gentleman in the
hansom cab had been perpetually on the ground with his officious finger
for ever in the pie; and how larger cans of half-and-half had been
consumed by the workmen at the cost of the dashing gentleman than the
landlord of the Prince’s Feathers remembers to have chalked up against
any one customer since he had traded as a licensed victualler.
All this Mr. Lowther was told; and beyond this, he heard how a lady,
very pretty and quite young, but a little pale and worn-looking, had
arrived at last to take possession of “the prettiest little box that was
ever put together, without regard to expense;” how she was attended by
an elderly female in black, who had evidently seen better days, and who
acted as nurse to a little boy; how two respectable young women had been
hired in the neighbourhood, to act as cook and housemaid; and how,
coming regularly to the Feathers in quest of the kitchen-beer, they had
already reported their mistress as the sweetest and pleasantest of
ladies, and first-cousin to the dashing gentleman in the hansom cab. The
landlord tried to look as if he had no uncharitable thoughts about this
cousinship; but Harcourt Lowther saw that Francis Tredethlyn and the
lady had been subjects of grave scandal in that quiet country place. He
heard that the dashing gentleman had been at Petersham almost every day
for the last week; and that he and the lady passed the greater part of
their time in the garden, where they might be seen at any time from the
high-road,--the gentleman smoking and playing with a little boy, and the
lady working, at a rustic table, under a mulberry-tree. A pot-boy,
coming in from his rounds, as Harcourt lounged at the bar, confirmed the
landlord’s statement when appealed to. He had passed Brook Cottage not
five minutes before, and had seen the lady and gentleman talking to a
gardener, who was doing something to a rose-tree.
“She’s a rare one for flowers, the lady is,” the potman said, in
conclusion.
A rare one for flowers: Harcourt Lowther mused gravely upon this remark.
The fair denizens of Bohemia, to whom he had introduced Francis, were
not generally devoted to floriculture in cottage-gardens, though they
were greedy of gigantic bouquets, to rest on the velvet cushions of
their opera-boxes, or the front seats of their carriages, when they
drove to race meetings. Who was this pale, worn-looking young woman, who
called Francis cousin? Was she really his cousin, that Cornish girl of
whom the soldier had told his master in Van Diemen’s Land, and whose
miserably-executed likeness had reminded Harcourt of another face, whose
owner had played some part in the experience of his life? Was this
inhabitant of the newly-furnished cottage really the Cornish cousin? Mr.
Lowther could scarcely imagine that it was so; for, in that case, why
should Francis have kept her existence a secret from his _fidus Achates_
in the person of Harcourt himself?
“Secrecy is only another name for guilt,” thought Mr. Lowther. “Our
friend has gone to the bad in real earnest this time, and I can make a
_coup_. I was getting very tired of the slow game.”
Armed with this information, the schemer went back to town, to take his
place in Maude’s opera-box, and to lead up to that idea of a morning at
the Cedars, which seemed to originate in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s own brain.
Chance, which had been against him so long, had gone with him
unfailingly in this business. The lucky moment had come; he had got his
lead at last, and had only to play his winning cards. Chance had been
constant to the schemer even in that interview between Francis and Rosa;
for it had happened that, in all Miss Grunderson’s candid outpourings,
she had not dropped a word about Mrs. Tredethlyn’s stroll in the
Petersham meadows; though, even if she had done so, the Cornishman might
have been very slow to perceive that an accidental glimpse of himself
and gentle Susy, in friendly companionship, could have been the primary
cause of that stormy greeting which he had received at the hands of his
wife. Francis accepted his wife’s passionate outburst as only the climax
of the disgust and weariness with which he had inspired her.
“She reproaches me for the life I have been leading lately,” he said
bitterly; “but she does not understand her own feelings. It is not my
life, but me she hates. It is myself that inspires the loathing and
contempt which she talked of, and not my late hours or my gambling and
horse-racing.”
After sitting for some time plunged in a gloomy reverie, in the dreary
library, where the backs of the books he never opened seemed to frown
upon him in their sombre Russia leather brownness, Francis stirred as
the little black marble clock on the mantel-piece chimed the quarter
after twelve, and felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a note which he had
found waiting for him on his table the previous night. It was a tiny
twisted _poulet_ from Harcourt Lowther:--
“DEAR FRANK,--A line to remind you of to-morrow night. You will
be expected any time after nine.--Yours always,
“H. L.”
This reminder referred to a bachelor’s supper which Mr. Lowther had
arranged at his lodgings; a party at which there was to be what the host
called a quiet rubber. A rubber played with that deadly quiet which
attends the science of whist when heavy amounts tremble in the balance,
and a sum that a poor man would call a fortune may depend on the
player’s judicious choice between a five and a seven. Such a rubber as
that which the well-known Sir Robert was once concluding, when, just as
he pondered over his two last cards, a thoughtless looker-on happened to
break the solemn silence by one luckless word, and lo, the chain of
scientific reasoning dropped to pieces,--the popular statesman played
the wrong card, and lost a thousand pounds. It was not often that
Harcourt Lowther entertained his friends; but when Francis lapsed into a
temporary stagnation, the master was apt to keep his pupil going on the
road to ruin by such an entertainment as this. The quiet rubber at Mr.
Lowther’s lodgings generally led to other rubbers elsewhere, or cursory
appointments for Liverpool or Newmarket, or Chester or Northampton, or a
dinner at Richmond, gaily cut for at blind hookey while the men were
rising from the whist-table. It was a quarter-past twelve now. It would
be nearly one o’clock before the fastest hansom could carry Mr.
Tredethlyn to the Strand. Francis looked from the clock on the
chimney-piece to the scrap of paper in his hand; hesitated for a few
moments, with a black frown upon his face, and then started hastily from
his lounging attitude, and looked about him for his hat.
“There couldn’t be a better opportunity,” he muttered, “for saying what
I want to say to him.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXV.
A HASTY RECKONING.
Harcourt Lowther had never played so bad a rubber as that with which he
beguiled the evening while waiting Francis Tredethlyn’s appearance at
the little bachelor-party assembled in his rooms. There was the usual
blending of the hawk and pigeon tribe at Mr. Lowther’s reunion: the
birds of prey distinguishable by the purple blackness of their dyed
moustaches and the crow’s-feet round their faded eyes; the innocent
fledglings fresh-coloured and tawny, with a profound belief in their own
wisdom and a supreme contempt for everything outside the narrow circle
in which they condescended to exist.
Mr. Lowther suffered his partner to knock under ignominiously to
antagonistic sevens and nines, while the big cards lurked idle in his
own hand, to fall at the close into the ravenous jaws of the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth trumps; nor was he to be roused into decent play
by the unqualified remonstrances of his victim. He was thinking of
Maude. It was not the face of the queen of spades which he saw as he sat
hopelessly staring at the card in a vain endeavour to concentrate his
attention; it was Maude’s speaking, passionate countenance which looked
at him, all aglow with angry feeling. He saw her in all her beauty as he
had seen her that afternoon,--the tremulous lips, the flashing blue
eyes,--for there are blue eyes which in anger have more fire than the
starriest orbs that ever veiled their lightnings under the cloudy lace
of an Andalusian marchesa. His love for her--which was one of the most
selfish passions of a selfish nature--had grown and strengthened day by
day since the hour of his return, and had kindled into an all-absorbing
flame now that he seemed so near his triumph.
_Was_ he near his triumph? That question occurred to him several times
as he sat opposite his friend Captain Harrison of the Spanish Legion,
playing the unluckiest rubber that the Captain had been engaged in for
weeks,--“And the beggar had such first-rate cards too,” as the Captain
said afterwards, politely criticising his friend’s play; “if he hadn’t