Only a clod
kep’ his trumps so jolly dark we could have carried everything before
us.”
Was he near his triumph? He had been playing for two stakes--the woman
he loved and the fortune he envied. He knew Maude Tredethlyn well enough
to know that so long as her husband lived, she was as far beyond his
reach as the stars which shone down upon him as he walked home from
Stuccoville, and of whose light he thought so little. Maude, as the
daughter of an insolvent trader, was a lovely being whom he had felt no
reluctance to resign; for he had looked forward with a horrible
foresight to the day when the girl he loved should be again within his
reach; no longer as a penniless spinster, but a wealthy widow. _This_
had been the goal which Harcourt had seen at the end of that weary road
along which he conducted the young man who trusted him. No physician
ever watched a patient more intently than Mr. Lowther watched the slow
undermining of the Cornishman’s glorious constitution under the
influence of late hours and hard drinking. The bloodshot eyes, the
unsteady hand, the failing appetite, the uncertain spirits, the feverish
unrest, were all diagnostics that marked the progress of the schemer’s
work. Mr. Lowther had seen so many young men drop down in the poisoned
atmosphere to which he introduced Maude’s husband. He hoped that the end
which had come to so many would come to this ignorant, blundering
rustic, into whose lap blind Plutus had cast the wealth that should have
fallen to better men. The end must come; for the stupid Crœsus tumbled
so helplessly into the snare, and abandoned himself so completely to his
captor’s mercy. It was only a question of patience. The end would come
in due time: and then there was the woman he loved, and the richest
widow in London, to reward the plotter’s patience, to crown his efforts
with happiness and success. To-day’s business, Harcourt Lowther argued,
as he played that unfortunate rubber, could not be otherwise than a
lucky stroke, likely to hurry matters to a crisis. Francis had slipped
out of his hands so often of late, had kept better hours and drunk less.
But a serious quarrel with Maude would inevitably fling Mr. Tredethlyn
back upon the spurious Lethe of the brandy-bottle, and would hasten the
schemer’s work to its fatal close. “I think I have shut the door of his
home upon him,” thought Harcourt; “it will be strange if he is not glad
to drop completely into the groove in which I want to see him.”
This, in plain English, is the plan which Harcourt Lowther had made for
himself; though he would scarcely have put his scheme into such very
plain words, even in his own thoughts. Iago, in a play or a novel, is
obliged to give utterance to his schemes with tolerable clearness; but
the real Iago is reticent, even in commune with himself, and huddles his
blackest thoughts into some dark corner of his mind, where they lie
conveniently hidden from the eye of conscience.
Before twelve o’clock Mr. Lowther had abandoned his place at the
whist-table to his brother; and after lounging behind the chair of a
young man who was playing _écarté_, and making a random bet now and
then, the host proposed supper,--a proposition which was received very
warmly by the men who were losing money, and very coolly by the winners.
Harcourt Lowther’s supper was almost as unceremonious an affair as that
memorable entertainment in Lant Street, Borough, at which Mr. Robert
Sawyer played the part of host. A young man, hired for the occasion from
a neighbouring tavern, laid the cloth very rapidly, while the guests
lounged against the corners of the mantel-pieces, and grouped themselves
in little knots, to discuss coming events in the racing world, or to
criticise current pictures and current theatricals, with an occasional
spice of current scandal.
The supper was very simple. There were unlimited supplies of those
delicate little oysters which seem created with a special view to
bachelors’ supper-parties, and the refreshment of exhausted playgoers;
and whose native beds the ignorant foreigner might not unnaturally
imagine to lie somewhere at the back of the Strand. And to wash these
down, Mr. Lowther had provided Chablis, white Hermitage, and
Rüdesheimer. There were spatch-cocks and devilled kidneys, fried
potatoes, monster lobsters, marvellous cheeses from the remotest cantons
of Switzerland, and the most delicate varieties of green-stuff from a
French fruiterer’s in the purlieus of Leicester Square. There was no
pretence of an elaborate entertainment; but there was an open case of
sparkling Moselle by the side of Mr. Lowther’s chair, into which he
dipped about once in five minutes; and the young man from the tavern had
been initiated into the mysteries of a claret-cup, which he compounded
at a rickety little sideboard in the inner room.
So far as the guests went, the supper was a success. There was just the
amount of confusion which gives a picnic flavour to a meal, and which
seems an infallible stimulant of animal spirits. Mr. Lowther’s visitors
enjoyed themselves immensely, and the party was becoming boisterous in
its gaiety, when the door was opened, and Francis Tredethlyn walked in.
Harcourt Lowther pushed away the Moselle case, which was now only filled
with tumbled straw and empty bottles, and called for a chair, which was
edged into the corner at the host’s right hand.
“You’ll have some supper, Tredethlyn?” he said, while Francis was
shaking hands with some of the men. They were all known to him, and all
knew his story, and had a pretty clear idea that Harcourt was what they
called “cleaning him out,” in the most approved style by which the
process can be performed. “These things are all cold, I’m afraid. Jones,
run across and get some fresh oysters, and you can order another
spatch-cock--to be ready in a quarter of an hour at the latest. Sit
down, dear boy. What the deuce have you been doing with yourself all
night? Give him elbow-room, Harding, that’s a good fellow, and don’t
knock your ashes on to this corner of the table-cloth just yet. Now,
then, Philcote, the ‘Last Rose of Summer’ as soon as you like; but you
may as well make up your mind what key you’ll sing it in _before_ you
begin.”
Francis called back the man as he was hurrying from the room.
“Stop!” he cried; “you needn’t order anything more--for me. I shan’t eat
supper to-night.”
Something in his tone arrested every other voice; and there was a
silence as sudden and as complete as if some magician had waved his wand
and changed Harcourt Lowther’s guests into stone. Something in his look
attracted every eye, and held it fixed in a wondering stare upon his
face. Mr. Philcote, who fancied himself an amateur Sims Reeves, was
disturbed in his calculation of that vocal bullfinch to be cleared
between the third and fourth notes of the “Last Rose of Summer,” and
abandoned all thoughts of singing his favourite ballad.
The Cornishman’s colourless face and disordered hair and dress might
have suggested the idea that he had been drinking; but there was an
inscrutable something in that white face which was not compatible with
drunkenness. Harcourt Lowther looked at him nervously. The marital
quarrel had come off, evidently, and Francis took matters very
seriously.
“Come, Mr. Troublefeast,” cried the host, “we’re not going to stand this
sort of thing, you know. We’ll have no statue of the Commander stalking
in upon us in the midst of our fun--without Mozart. What the deuce is
the matter with you, dear boy? Roderick, pass that tankard this way,
will you? You fellows down there contrive to keep everything to
yourself. Let the rosy vintage circulate. There’s another half-dozen of
the claret in the next room, and no end of lemons. So the moment for the
selfishness of the savage to overpower the civilization of the gentleman
has not arrived. Come, Frank, take down the shutters, and light up;
you’ve made us all as quiet as the frozen crew described by that
pertinacious old bore, the Ancient Mariner. Take a long dip into that
tankard, old fellow, and come up bright again.”
Mr. Lowther struck his small white hand lightly upon his friend’s
shoulder as he concluded. Francis had dropped into the place offered to
him, and sat there, looking like nothing _but_ the Commander, in his
stony rigidity of face and figure. As Harcourt Lowther’s hand alighted
on his shoulder, he startled every one by throwing it deliberately away
from him.
“I have had enough of your friendship, thank you,” he said;
“henceforward, if we are to be anything at all to each other, I had
rather we should be foes--I may have better luck perhaps that way.”
“Tredethlyn! are you drunk? or mad?”
“Neither, but I _have_ been both; for I have trusted you. You needn’t
ask me what I mean,” said Francis, interrupting Harcourt Lowther’s
exclamation by a rapid gesture of his uplifted hand; “I am going to tell
you, and very plainly. Gentlemen, you were going to listen to a song
just now; have you any objection to hearing a story instead? There will
be time for your ballad afterwards, you know, Philcote. My story is not
a long one.”
Harcourt Lowther had turned very pale. His light blue eyes glittered,
and the slim white fingers of his right hand closed involuntarily on the
knife that had been lying near them. He looked as a man might look, who
marching proudly upon the road to victory, saw the earth yawn asunder
beneath his feet, and knew all at once that his next step must hurl him
to a dreadful death. He was very quiet; but the quivering of his thin
nostrils, the quickening of his breath, and his faded colour, betrayed a
degree of hesitation which set his guests wondering, and infused a dash
of excitement into the wind-up of the little banquet. The highest
development of Christianity cannot quite extinguish the natural savage.
Cromwell’s Ironsides did murderous work with the gospel in their wallets
and pious exclamations upon their lips; and it seems the attribute of
human nature to delight in a row. The guests at Harcourt Lowther’s
supper-table pricked up their ears with one accord, and it was with
considerable difficulty that they managed to keep up a faint attempt at
that kind of conversation which had engaged them, in twos and threes,
before Francis Tredethlyn’s entrance. When they spoke to one another
now, it was only in undertones, and their disjointed sentences revealed
the fact that they were listening to the speaker at the end of the
table. But when Francis spoke of telling a story, the company dropped
all pretence of indifference to him; and listened with a polite
appearance of perfect unconsciousness as to any unfriendly intention on
the part of the late visitor.
“Sing your song, Philcote,” said Harcourt Lowther, resolutely; “we want
no stories--we’ve no time for twaddle of that sort. Let’s have a good
song or two, and then we’ll go into the next room for a rubber.”
Mr. Philcote, whose nerves were fluttered by the ominous gloom that had
so suddenly fallen upon the assembly, gave a despairing cough, and made
a husky plunge at the A flat on which he should have begun the sweetest
song-writer’s sweetest song; but before he had articulated his
initiatory “’Tis,” a big man with a black moustache, who owed Harcourt
Lowther a grudge, and had been consuming the best bits of the lobsters,
and the lion’s share of the Moselle, under a mental protest, interrupted
the timid singer:
“Let’s have the story first, and the ‘Last Rose’ afterwards,” he said.
“Fire away, Tredethlyn; your audience have supped luxuriously, and are
in good humour.”
“I dare say it’s a common story enough in your set, Boystock,” answered
Francis; “but it isn’t a long one. It is the story of a man who was
lifted one day from poverty to wealth, and found himself all at once