Only a clod
right; but you can’t pump the sacred wind into a man with vulgar
bellows. It comes, dear boy; and it will come to your humble servant, I
have no doubt. I shall dine at the St. James’s, and I’ve two or three
places to go to in the evening; so I leave you to your reflections and
the goulard-water. Adieu!”
The diplomatist had no opportunity of serving his brother by any
sentimental hints about secret sorrows and mortal illness; for Maude
sent Julia Desmond to receive her visitor, and to hear anything he might
have to say about Francis. Mrs. Tredethlyn would see no one and would go
nowhere. Julia had been busy all the morning writing excuses to people
whose invitations had been accepted. Miss Grunderson had called, and had
sent up pencilled supplications upon the backs of cards, imploring her
dear Mrs. Tredethlyn to see her, if only for a few minutes; but Maude
had been inexorable. There are sorrows which friendship is powerless to
soothe; and in the time of such sorrow noisy friendship is above all
things intolerable. Maude shuddered as she thought of Miss Grunderson’s
warm paws and schoolgirl endearments; so Rosa was sent away
disconsolate.
Roderick Lowther would have been very well contented to loiter in Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s morning-room talking to Julia, whose half-haughty,
half-defiant manner had a wonderful fascination for him; but that young
lady gave him no opportunity of dawdling. She had seen his tactics with
regard to Miss Grunderson, and took care to let him know that she
understood his diplomacy; but she listened to all his insinuations
against Francis, and he saw her eyes brighten as he uttered them.
“She will convey my hints to Mrs. Tredethlyn,” thought the diplomatist,
“and they won’t lose by her interpretation; so I’ve done that fellow a
service, and wasted my morning, since Miss Grunderson is not to be
seen.”
But on leaving Julia Mr. Lowther decided on speculating a call upon
Rosa’s papa. There was always the chance of seeing the young lady; and
as Mrs. Tredethlyn’s house could no longer afford a platform for the
carrying out of Roderick’s matrimonial schemes, it was absolutely
necessary that he should try a bold stroke and advance matters. He had
ascertained Rosa’s address, and had no difficulty in finding the
Grunderson mansion, which was close at hand. He was not very certain
about the number of the house, but selected it unhesitatingly from its
fellows for the vivid greenness of its blinds, and the intense newness
which pervaded every object that was visible through unshrouded windows
of plate-glass. The Grunderson mansion bared its inner splendours
unflinchingly to the eyes of the passer-by; and Mr. Grunderson’s
dining-room, superb in pollard oak, and with the Grunderson arms blazing
on the scarlet morocco backs of the chairs, revealed itself to the very
core of its heart to every butterman’s apprentice or butcher’s boy who
brought his wares to the area-gate. Thus Roderick Lowther found it very
difficult not to make his perception of Mr. Grunderson, seated at the
head of his table with a substantial luncheon before him, unpleasantly
palpable while he rang the visitors’ bell. Fortune favoured the
diplomatist, for the hospitable millionaire insisted on his being
ushered into the dining-room; very much to the discomfiture of Rosa, who
was partaking of an unfashionable plate of underdone beef from the
sirloin before her papa, and who had a big bottle containing some yellow
compound in the way of pickle, and ornamented by a blazing label, on her
right hand, and an imperial pint of Guinness’s stout on her left. The
stout and the embarrassment produced by Mr. Lowther’s appearance
combined to dye Rosa’s cheeks with a very vivid carnation; but the
diplomatist would have been less than a diplomatist if he had not
appeared supremely unconscious of the two bottles and the underdone
beef.
“Sit ye down, Mr. Lowther, and make yourself at home,” exclaimed the
hospitable Mr. Grunderson. “A knife and fork for this gentleman, Thomas;
and look sharp about it. You’ll find this here as fine a bit of beef as
ever was cut from an Aberdeen bullock; and there ain’t no bullocks equal
to a Scotch short-horn, go where you will. Let me give you a slice out
of the alderman’s walk, which was a name my father always gave to the
undercut; and a very good father he was too, though he never thought of
my sittin’ down to table upon the very spot where he built hisself a
tool-house forty year ago, when you couldn’t have got six pound an acre
per annum for any ground about here. There’s a pigeon-pie at the other
end of the table, and there’s some of your foreign kickshaws,--cutlets a
la curlpapers, and mutton-chops a la smashed potato, _I_ call ’em; for
I’m not a young man, Mr. Lowther, and I can’t remember your _soubeeses_,
and your _maintenongs_, and your _jardineers_, and so on, as my daughter
can. We don’t have the men to wait at lunch, for my daughter says it
isn’t manners; and I’m very glad it ain’t, for I can’t say I enjoy my
meals when I have to take ’em with a couple of fellows shoving
vegetable-dishes and sauce-boats at me every two minutes, and never
shoving the right ones; for I’m blest if I ever knew ’em yet to shove me
the cucumber before I’d half finished my salmon, though they do call
themselves experienced servants. Howsomedever, if we must dine ally
Rousse, and wrap our mutton-chops in greasy paper and call ’em
maintennong, we must, and there’s an end of it; but I don’t mind
confessing to you, Mr. Lowther, that this is the time I make _my_
dinner, and it’s no use frowning at me, Rosa, for I don’t care who knows
it.”
Mr. Lowther, whose luncheon generally consisted of a glass of
seltzer-and-sherry and one small biscuit, escaped the infliction of one
of Mr. Grunderson’s plates of beef by a judicious manœuvre, and helped
himself to a morsel of pigeon-pie. But before doing so, he allowed his
eyes to wander about the walls in contemplation of some impossible
conglomerations of brown rockery and soapsud sky, which Mr. Grunderson
called his Sallivaters; and thus gave Rosa time to dismiss her bottles
and her plate, and to recover from her embarrassment.
After this everything went very smoothly. Mr. Grunderson expanded under
the influence of bottled stout and Madeira, and was very loquacious; but
sinking presently into a rather stertorous slumber, which he called
forty winks, and which generally lasted about an hour and a half, the
_ci-devant_ market-gardener left Rosa and Roderick to their own
resources. On this Mr. Lowther would have departed, but the candid Rosa
begged him to remain. She had kept up a visiting acquaintance with most
of her old school-fellows, and as she was perpetually making new
acquaintances, she was positively besieged by callers, and had a
tea-drinking institution, which she called a kettle-drum, almost every
afternoon. The idea of exhibiting the elegant diplomatist to her
feminine circle was eminently delightful to Miss Grunderson; and as soon
as her papa had begun to snore with undisguised vehemence, she conducted
Roderick to the drawing-room, where there were as many albums, and
perfume-caskets, and ormolu workboxes, and enamelled book-slides, and
_solitaire_ boards, as would have stocked one of Messrs. Parkins and
Gotto’s show-rooms, and where a grand piano, scattered with all the
easiest polkas in the gaudiest covers, testified to Rosa’s taste for
music.
Miss Grunderson’s kettle-drum visitors began to assemble almost
immediately; and before long Rosa’s drawing-room was full of young
ladies in overpowering bonnets and transparent cloaks of every
imaginable tissue. The male element was very much in the minority at
Miss Grunderson’s gatherings, and was chiefly represented by speechless
younger brothers, who came in sulky submission to overbearing sisters,
and who lounged in uncomfortable attitudes upon Rosa’s most fragile
chairs, spilt their tea upon the velvet table-covers, rarely moved
without knocking something down, and left dingy thumb-marks in all
Rosa’s albums. Amongst such as these Roderick shone like a star of the
first magnitude, and Miss Grunderson exhibited him with unspeakable
pride. The kettle-drum lasted for two mortal hours, and Mr. Lowther was
one of the last to depart, bored to death, as he told his brother
afterwards.
“But a fellow must bring his mind to go through a good deal if he wants
to marry a millionaire’s only daughter in these hard times,” thought the
_attaché_, despondently, as he went yawning to bed. “If my lovely Rosa
does become Mrs. Lowther, she will have to renounce her _penchant_ for
bad French and violent pink dresses; but she may cram her drawing-room
with acquaintance of _quasi_-gentility, and drink tea all day, so far as
I shall be concerned in the matter.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXIX.
TOO LATE.
A long miserable week wore itself slowly out after the night in which
Francis Tredethlyn had turned his back upon a house which he had never
been allowed to find a home. Through all the week there were no tidings
of Maude’s departed husband; but when the week was over, a formal letter
from Mr. Kursdale acquainted her with Mr. Tredethlyn’s arrangements for
her welfare, and with the fact that he had embarked the day before on
board the steam-vessel _Kingfisher_, bound for Buenos Ayres. The news
inflicted as great a shock upon Maude as if her husband’s letter
announcing his intended departure had never been written. To the last
she had believed, that when the time for action came, his resolution
would fail him all at once, and he would hurry back to her, faithful and
devoted as in the earliest days of their brief married life, when he had
nursed her Skye terriers, and sat patiently for an hour at a stretch in
a haberdasher’s shop while she selected ribands and laces. She had
written him a penitent letter, and had enclosed it to Mr. Kursdale,
entreating that gentleman to deliver it to his client whenever he saw
him. She had not thought it possible that, even if Francis persisted in
his intention of leaving England, he would leave without an interview
with his solicitor. But when Maude drove post-haste to Gray’s Inn, and
presented herself in the lawyer’s office, she found that there had been
no interview. Francis had communicated with his solicitor by letter
only, and his clear and concise epistle bore the date of the very day on
which he was to start for Plymouth, whence the _Kingfisher_ was to sail.
The letter thus dated had arrived at the lawyer’s office after business
hours; and when Mr. Kursdale opened it next morning, there was little
doubt that the _Kingfisher_ was outward bound with Francis Tredethlyn on
board her. Maude made a confidant of her husband’s solicitor. A family
lawyer is a kind of father confessor in the matter of secrets, and has
generally outlived the capacity of surprise as completely as those
imperturbable disciples of St. Ignatius Loyola who are irreverently
entitled “crows.” The despondent wife told Mr. Kursdale that Francis had
left home in consequence of a slight misunderstanding--(was any conjugal
quarrel ever yet described by the belligerents as anything _more_ than a
slight misunderstanding?)--and she implored him to assist her in
bringing about her husband’s speedy return.
“But do you think he has really sailed?” she asked; “do you think he can
have been so cruel as to leave England without even giving me the
opportunity of imploring him to remain?”
Mr. Kursdale shook his head gravely.
“There is nothing in his letter to me which indicates indifference to
your wishes,” he said; “it is only a business letter; but in a practical