Only a clod
speech she uttered. After that, she was comforter, confidante, friend,
and she was almost sorry to see the endurance of Maude’s grief. “You
have your fine house and your carriages still,” she said, as the young
wife sat on the ground at her feet in the abandonment of her sorrow;
“you could never have married Francis Tredethlyn for any other reason
than the wealth he could give you. What does it matter to you whether he
is true or false? You never loved him.”
“No,” answered Maude, naïvely, “I suppose not. But it is so shameful of
him to care for anybody else. And from what Harcourt Lowther says, he
does care for that horrible person; and to leave me, Julia, day after
day, and to be--there--all the time--in a garden--smoking--looking as
much at home as if he had lived there all his life--I never can forgive
him, Julia!”
“Of course not,” Miss Desmond replied promptly; “but I don’t see that
you need make yourself so very unhappy about his conduct. You will have
a formal separation, I suppose. Your papa, or your papa’s solicitors,
will manage that, no doubt; and you will live quietly in a smaller house
than this. You will not be able to go so much into society, you know;
for it is so difficult for a woman who is separated from her husband to
escape scandal, however careful she may be,” Julia added, with
considerable satisfaction. It is so nice to sit in the dust and mingle
our sympathetic tears with those of the fallen powers who have lately
queened it over us.
Maude’s sobs redoubled.
“Society!” she exclaimed. “I hate society! Yes, it’s no use talking,
Julia. I know what you’re going to say about my going out to three
parties a night, and so on; but I don’t like it--nobody likes it. They
get into the whirlpool, and there they are. If you go to Mrs. A.’s
Thursday, you must go to Lady B.’s Friday, or you offend her; and if you
go once, you must go on going, or it seems as if you didn’t like the
people you met; and then, if you don’t ask people, you are accused of
dropping them; and if you ask strange people, you are accused of picking
them up; and if you always ask the same people, your parties are called
slow; and if you ask different people, you are called capricious. I am
so tired of the world, Julia,” sighed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “When I drive any
distance to dinner on an autumn evening, I always envy the people who
live in little villas, and drink tea at seven o’clock in pretty parlours
that I can see in the firelight. They seem _so_ happy. I never hear a
muffin-bell--don’t laugh, Julia; but there _is_ something peculiar in a
muffin-bell--without thinking how hollow my life is, compared to the
lives of the people who eat the muffins. And then I fancy that I should
have been so much happier in a pretty little cottage in St. John’s Wood,
with a tiny, tiny back-garden sloping down to the canal, and a still
tinier garden in front for Floss to bark in. I used to think sometimes,”
continued Maude dropping her voice and speaking with some slight
embarrassment, “that Francis and I would get to understand each other
better by-and-by, and that we should lead quite a Darby-and-Joan sort of
life, doing a great deal of good, and going out much less. But, of
course, that hope is quite gone now. I can never endure his society
again. I could never trust him. And oh, Julia, I did trust him so
implicitly! I had such a belief in his goodness that I despised myself
for not being better worthy of him. And to think that he should deceive
me so cruelly; that he should have been deceiving me all along, leading
a wicked life amongst wicked people for his own pleasure; when I fancied
that he was driven from his home by my indifference, and reproached
myself so bitterly for being wanting in my duty to him.”
In this strain poor Maude discoursed at intervals for some hours. Julia
was very patient, sympathetic even, in a hard kind of way; but she bore
with all her weight upon the evidence of Francis Tredethlyn’s perfidy,
and she drained the cup of her triumph to the very dregs.
It was not till the next morning that the letter which Francis had left
in the library was delivered to his wife. She was sitting in her
boudoir, with an untasted breakfast before her, and the sympathetic
Julia on the other side of the table, when her maid brought the missive,
which a housemaid had discovered at daybreak on her master’s table, two
or three hours before Mr. Tredethlyn’s valet found the little bedroom
behind the library untenanted, and perceived that his master had not
slept at home.
The Cornishman’s letter was very simply worded. Maude opened it hastily
in the hope that it might contain some justification of her husband’s
conduct. But he did not even allude to his delinquencies, and confined
himself to bidding an earnest and friendly farewell to the wife who had
never loved him. Tears of disappointment, humiliation, regret, poured
slowly down Maude’s cheeks as she read the letter. It was the first time
Francis had written to her since her marriage; and there was something
almost strange to her in the sight of his bold commercial hand, whose
accustomed regularity had been a little disturbed by the writer’s
agitation.
“MY VERY DEAR WIFE,--I write to you for the first time since it
has been my privilege to address you by that sacred name. If I
could tell you the pride and happiness I once felt in that
privilege, when first you laid your hand in mine, when first I
heard you called by my name, I should be a very different person
from what I am; and then it is possible this letter need never
have been written. I write to bid you good-bye, Maude; and I
think the best proof I can give you of my love is the proof I
give you now, when I bring my mind to the necessity of our
separation, and resign myself to the knowledge that I may never
see your face again upon this earth.
“I will not tell you how soon I discovered your
indifference--how soon another person demonstrated to me that
your feeling towards me was even something worse than
indifference; that it was dislike and contempt which I inspired
in your mind. My dense ignorance of the world, and your amiable
nature, would have prevented my making this discovery of my own
accord. But there are always plenty of those ‘good-natured
friends’ the man in the play talks about. _I found such a
friend._ If you have any curiosity upon the subject, Rosa
Grunderson, who is a good honest-hearted little girl, will tell
you the name of the man who opened my eyes to the full misery of
my position. In writing this, Maude, I have no thought of
reproach against _you_. To me you have been and always will be
something so bright and lovely as to be amenable to none of the
common laws which govern common natures. When you offered to be
my wife, you yielded to a generous impulse; and it is I who
deserve reproach for having been so base in my blind selfishness
as to accept the sacrifice you were willing to offer in
repayment of a fancied obligation. I cannot undo the past; but I
can at least set you in some manner free from the fetters you
forged for yourself under the influence of that brief
enthusiasm. So long as I live, one of the miseries of my life
will be the knowledge that I shut you out of a brighter fate;
that I deprive you of a more worthy companion; that the greatest
sacrifice I can make in atonement of the past will only make you
the lonely widow of a living husband. But I can at least rid you
of the society of a man whose presence inspires you with disgust
and loathing. O Maude, I am quoting your own words; spoken so
deliberately, so coldly, that I should be indeed mad and
cowardly, were I to shrink from accepting them in their fullest
import. I might have doubted until to-night; I might have hugged
myself with the notion that a liar and a scoundrel, for his own
base purposes, had taught me to think myself despised and
disliked; but your own lips have spoken, and I can doubt no
longer. Oh, my darling, my pet, my beloved, this seems so like a
reproach; but it is not, it is _not_.
“I am going to South America. When you read this, my
preparations will no doubt have begun. If possible, I shall sail
immediately. Of all the men who ever left England for that fiery
young world out yonder, there was never, perhaps, any one better
adapted to be happy and successful there than I am. I bid
good-bye for ever to the idle dissipations, the drunken orgies
in which I have sometimes found distraction, but never
happiness. And I begin a new life in a new field of labour. My
uncle’s money has been the root of all my misery, and I shall
take very little of that useless gold to the other shore. I
don’t think I was ever guilty of any great folly while I was a
poor man; but since I have been a rich one, my life has seemed
one long mistake.
“I write so much about myself and my own plans because I do not
want the memory of me, or of any sorrow which I may feel in this
parting, to cloud the brightness of your future; and I
understand your generous nature well enough to know that you
will be happier if you can believe that I am happy. O Maude, if
you could know how anxious I am that the life before you should
be a bright and happy one, you might almost forgive me for the
pain my selfish folly has inflicted upon you! My poor,
generous-hearted girl! my innocent darling! you thought it was
so light a thing to link your life to the life of a man whom you
could not love; and you have borne your burden so quietly. I
cannot release you from the chain that binds you to me, but I
will do my best to make that chain a light one. And, for the
rest, I go to a country in which life and death walk hand in
hand together. I take with me all an ignorant man’s love of
adventure, a soldier’s indifference to danger. Wear your chain
patiently, darling,--you may not have to wear it long. But one
word of warning from the man who has loved you so foolishly,
and, until this night, so selfishly. You have married hastily
once. Weigh well what you do if ever you marry again. If you
accepted for your husband an ignorant West-country boor when you
married me, I was at least an honest man. If I die, Maude, and
you are free to make a second marriage, be sure that the husband
of your choice has something of your own noble character; as
well as some smattering of the accomplishments that please you,
and the tricky jargon about art and literature which passes for
cleverness. I was anxious once to make myself a gentleman for
your sake, Maude; and when we have been visiting together, I
have listened to the men’s talk, for I wanted to find out how it
was done; and you could never guess how spurious some of that
brilliant conversation sounds to a man who _only_ listens. I
used to read some of your Mudie books in my own room sometimes
of a morning,--Froude, and Carlyle, Burton, Barth, and so on;
and I’ve heard men laying down the law about them at night, and
I have known from their talk that they hadn’t read a page of the
book itself, and were only airing the second-hand opinions
picked up out of a review.
“I saw you shudder once, Maude, because I didn’t know it was the
right thing to say ‘Barkley Square;’ and pronounced the word as
it is spelt. But oh, what bosh I’ve heard the Barkley-Squarers
talk sometimes about things I do understand! I’ve heard a man at
a dinner-party hold forth about our convict system sometimes,