Only a clod
alone in a world as strange to him as if he had been transported out of
this planet into another inhabited by a different species.”
“Egad,” muttered Mr. Boystock, “I wish somebody would transport me!”
“Ah, it isn’t likely, old fellow, in _that_ way,” murmured his
neighbour.
“For some time the country-bred cub--he was country-bred, and what you
would call a cub--got on well enough. He floundered into a few mistakes,
and he floundered out of them, after his own ignorant fashion. I think
there is a providence for such men, as there is for drunkards, and so
long as they stagger along _alone_, they come to very little grief. He
did a great many silly things with his money, I dare say; but I think he
_once_ did a generous thing--though, God knows, in doing it, he only
followed the blind impulse of his undisciplined heart as ignorantly as
if he had been some blundering Newfoundland dog that pulls the mistress
he loves out of the water where he sees her drowning. His wealth
prospered with him, though he had cared little enough for it when it
fell into his hands. By means of it he was able to save the woman he
loved from a great trouble; and in her boundless gratitude for the
service which he valued so lightly, she abandoned herself to the purest
impulse that ever stirred a noble breast, and offered him her hand. If
he had been generous or wise, he would have refused the hand which could
not give him a heart. He was only--in love. Selfishly, stupidly, he
seized the proffered sacrifice; too besotted in his blind passion to
perceive that it was a sacrifice.”
Mr. Lowther’s guests stared blankly at one another. They had not dropped
their own talk to hear such stuff as this. Harcourt sat very still, with
his hand always upon the knife. At the other end of the table lounged
Roderick, the very picture of well-bred indifference. He felt that his
brother had dropped in for it; but he had no idea of interrupting the
action of the little drama by any fraternal championship.
“Let them fight it out their own way,” he thought; “I like to see the
white man suffer.”
“The country-bred cub was still fresh to the intoxication of his fancied
happiness, when a man who had been familiar with him in his poverty came
from the distant part of the world where they had met and known each
other, and offered to be his friend. The cub’s ignorance of life was so
complete, that he did not know it was possible for a man who bore her
Majesty’s commission, and called himself a gentleman, to be a liar and a
villain. He trusted his old acquaintance implicitly, and accepted him as
a friend--believing, still in his boorish ignorance, that there was such
a thing as friendship, or, at the worst, an honourable good fellowship
between honest men. His friend did not tell him that he had been the
engaged lover of the woman the boor was going to marry; and when the
young couple began their new life, he planted himself in their house;
and his first act was to shut the husband from the home whose dingiest
room was a paradise, so long as it was sanctified by the presence of an
idolized wife. Will any one at this table guess the plot which the
boor’s friend hatched against him in the hour when their hands first met
in friendship? I think not. The gentleman--polished, well-born, highly
educated--allowed the country cub to marry the woman he loved; reserving
to himself the hope of marrying her, enriched by the cub’s money, when
the cub was dead. This once arranged, there was only one thing more to
be settled; and that was the cub’s life. Unluckily he was a brawny
six-foot fellow, with the constitution of a prize-fighter. But then
prize-fighters are not always long-lived; their habits are so apt to be
against them. Well, gentlemen, there have been men who have undermined a
victim’s strength with small doses of antimony, while they smiled in his
face, and called him brother. We manage these things better nowadays.
The gentleman resolved that the boor should drink himself to death.”
“Is this the plot of a French novel?” asked Roderick, superciliously,
after a brief silence, in which Francis Tredethlyn had paused to take
breath; “if it is, you had better tell us the title of the book, and let
us read it in the original. There may be some chance of our thinking it
interesting _then_.”
“There are shameful things done out of novels as well as in them, Mr.
Lowther,” answered Francis. “What I am telling you is the truth. The
gentleman took the wealthy boor under his protection, and from that hour
the cub’s mind and the cub’s body began to wither under the influence of
a vice which of himself he held in abhorrence, but which in the dull
indifference of a man who has no hope to elevate him, no aim to strive
for, he was weak enough to accept as the cure for all his troubles. What
did it matter how many glasses of brandy he drank, or how often he
staggered across his dreary threshold in the early morning, stupefied by
foul gaslit atmospheres and bad wines? His friend took care to remind
him that there was no one to be sorry for his misdeeds, or to rejoice in
his repentance if he repented. He could not sink so low that his wife
would be affected by his degradation; he could not rise so high that she
would be proud of his elevation. His friend dinned the bitter truth into
the wretch’s ear. The beautiful young wife despised him; the wealth that
other men envied was useless to him, except in its power to buy the
oblivion of the brandy-bottle. From the hour in which his well-born
friend took him under his protection, the boor never did a generous
action, or heard a noble sentiment; and he very rarely went home sober.
He was drinking himself to death as fast as a strong man can, when
Providence took compassion on him, and gave him a duty to fulfil. A
helpless girl, his kinswoman, was thrown across his path, and all at
once he found himself of use in the world. From that moment his friend’s
scheme was overthrown. Good-bye to the brandy-bottle and the bad wines!
The boor had a friendless woman dependent on his protection, and he had
something to live for. He determined to sink the past; bid farewell to
the wife whose affection he was unable to win; turn his back upon the
circle he had lived in and the people who had known him; and finish his
days honestly among honest men.”
“‘So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber,’” exclaimed
Mr. Boystock. “It’s a very good story, I dare say; but apropos to what?”
demanded the gentleman, looking at Harcourt Lowther with a malicious
twinkle in his little black eyes. “I don’t see the connection with the
proverbial _bottes_. What does it all mean?”
“It means, gentlemen, that I am the boor who has been the dupe of a
villain, and will be so no longer; and the name of the villain is
Harcourt Lowther.”
There was a moment’s silence, followed by a sudden smashing of glass. A
pair of small sinewy white hands fastened cat-like upon Francis
Tredethlyn’s throat, and he and Harcourt Lowther were grappling each
other in a fierce struggle. It was very long since the gentleman had
been weak enough to get in a passion. He had sat as still as a statue
while the Cornishman set forth his indictment, waiting to see how
completely he had failed; and now that he knew that his plot, so
deliberately laid, so patiently carried out, was only a bungling
business after all--for the man _must_ have bungled who fails so
utterly--Mr. Lowther lost his head all in a moment, and abandoned
himself to a sudden access of rage, that reduced him to the level of a
wounded tiger.
It was scarcely with Francis that he was angry. What did it matter how
this man spoke of him or thought of him? What did it matter that these
other men should hear him accused of a baseness, which was only an
intellectual improvement upon the vulgar process by which the
gentlemanly birds of prey plucked the tender plumage of their victims?
All this was nothing. It was against himself--against his own
failure--that Harcourt Lowther’s fury was raging; only like all fury of
that kind, it was ravenous for vengeance of some sort. It was only for
about twenty seconds that his claws were fastened on Francis
Tredethlyn’s throat. A Cornish heavy-weight is not exactly the kind of
person for a delicately-built Sybarite to wrestle with very
successfully.
“We are rather celebrated for this sort of thing in my county,” Mr.
Tredethlyn muttered between his set teeth, as he loosened Harcourt
Lowther’s grasp from his throat, and hurled him in a kind of bundle to a
corner of the room, where he fell crashing down amongst the ruins of a
dumb-waiter, half buried under a chaos of broken bottles and
lobster-shells.
Roderick Lowther would have sprung upon his brother’s foe in the next
minute, but the other men hustled round him and hemmed him in.
“Don’t you see the fellow’s a Hercules?” cried one of them; “let him
alone, Lowther.”
“Let me go!” roared the diplomatist; “I know my brother’s a
false-hearted rascal, but I won’t stand by and see a Lowther played at
ball with by any boor in Christendom. Let me get at him, Boystock, or I
shall hurt you.” But Francis had walked quietly to the door, and turning
with his hand upon the lock, waited for a moment’s pause in the
confusion before he spoke.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are witnesses that your friend attacked me. I
have no quarrel with Mr. Roderick Lowther; and as I am the bigger man of
the two, there would be no credit for either him or me in a scuffle
between us. If Harcourt Lowther wants to see me, he will be able to find
me any time this week at the Grand Hotel, Covent Garden; after this week
I shall sail for South America by the first packet that leaves
Liverpool.”
He paused a second time. There was no answer. The diplomatist had
thought better of his thirst for fraternal retribution.
“Why should I get myself into a mess about the beggar?” he thought; “he
wouldn’t see _me_ out of a scrape, I dare say.”
So Francis departed unquestioned: not to return to the Stuccoville
mansion, but to walk up Southampton Street, and across Covent Garden, to
seek a shelter in the old lodgings where he had lived so pleasantly in
his bachelor days.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXVI.
POOR FRANK’S LETTER.
Maude shut herself in her own rooms after her interview with Francis,
and refused to see any one except Julia. She wanted some one to cling to
in her sudden distress, and was fain to throw herself upon the Irish
girl’s bosom for consolation.
Then Julia Desmond had her revenge. It was very sweet to see the woman
who had usurped the cup of prosperity once held to her own lips brought
down so low; more wretched in the midst of her wealth and grandeur than
Julia had been in her lonely attic at Bayswater, with a July sun glaring
in upon her through a curtainless window, and the drowsy voices of her
pupils droning in her ears. The pleasure that thrilled through her
breast as she held Maude Tredethlyn in her arms, and heard her declare,
amidst passionate sobs, that Francis had been false and base and wicked,
and that she was the most miserable woman in the world, was a sensation
more exquisite than Miss Desmond had ever known before. For the honour
of humanity, that wicked pleasure did not last very long. The daughter
of Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond was not altogether base. Maude
was at her feet, and she was avenged. It was her rival’s insolent
happiness--happiness always _does_ seem insolent to the unhappy--that
had galled her to the quick. The two women were on a level now, and
Julia forgave her old companion.
“I told you he was a villain,” she said; and that was the only unkind