Only a clod
strength of her truth and purity, and shook herself free from the toils
as easily as if they had been so much gossamer. “There is something due
from me to you?” she asked, haughtily. “What is it?”
“The fulfilment of your broken promise. I have waited, Maude, and waited
patiently. Another man would have revenged himself on your inconstancy
by proving to you that he too could be inconstant. Hopeless but patient,
I have given you a disinterested devotion which is without a parallel in
the history of man’s sacrifice for the woman of his choice. Now that you
are free, I ask some atonement for the past, some reward for my
patience. Tell me that the past is not quite forgotten--that the tender
protestations which consoled me in my miserable exile were not utterly
meaningless and false. Why do you look at me like that? Have I been the
dupe of a coquette from first to last, Mrs. Tredethlyn, and does your
husband’s death only leave you free to jilt me again? Have I been fooled
to the top of my bent by a woman who has never loved me?”
“No, Mr. Lowther,” Maude answered, very quietly; “I did love you once. I
look back now, and wonder at myself as I remember how dearly. But my
love died--a very sudden death.”
“When you discovered the advantages of a wealthy marriage for the
penniless daughter of a commercial defaulter,” cried Harcourt.
“No; my love for you was a girlish fancy, if you like; though Heaven
only knows how deeply I felt for you in your exile--how willing I would
have been to resign my imaginary wealth for love of you, if you had
asked me to do so. But you never did ask that. You did not want the wife
without the fortune. When you came home and found me engaged to another
man--about to sacrifice myself in a mercenary marriage, as you
thought--there was yet time to have exacted the fulfilment of my
promise. I loved you then, Harcourt Lowther. A word from you, and I
would have told Francis Tredethlyn the truth, and demanded my release.
He was far too generous to have withheld it. But in doing that I should
have offended my father, and I should have come to you penniless. You
did not want me on those terms, Harcourt. The honest indignation of a
disinterested lover never found an utterance on your lips. You were
contented to assume the position of friend and confidant to your
unconscious rival; and it is only since I have been left alone to think
of my past life, that I have fully understood the dishonour involved in
keeping our broken engagement a secret from my husband. I loved you when
you came back to England, Harcourt. It was a hard battle which duty had
to fight against the unaltered affection of my girlhood. I prayed to God
night and day for strength to do my duty, and to keep my promise to the
man who had a claim upon me, which you have never known. I prayed for
power to blot your image from my mind; and my prayer was heard. My first
foolish love died on my wedding-day, Harcourt, when you stood by to see
me married to Francis Tredethlyn. From that hour to this you have been
no more to me than any other man who has paid me the conventional
attentions which I imagined I had a right to receive. If I had ever seen
more than this in your conduct, Mr. Lowther, you would have found me
quite capable of asserting my position.”
“The world has chosen to see a good deal more than conventional courtesy
in my attendance upon you, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” answered Harcourt. He had
lost the game. Utterly defeated in the moment of his expected triumph,
he was careless as to the rest of his play. How can the whist-player,
who knows that he is beaten, be expected to pay any great attention to
the order in which he plays the two or three insignificant cards that he
holds at the close of the rubber? “People have been good enough to make
us the subject of considerable discussion, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” continued
Harcourt. “A man is apt to hear these things, though they rarely reach
the ears of the lady most interested in hearing them. The people amongst
whom we live have made up their minds about us, I know, and will be
considerably astonished if you throw me over now that you are free to
reward the patient devotion which, has endured so much in the hope of
this hour.”
He saw Maude’s look of unutterable scorn; a look which revealed her to
him in a new and higher light, and inspired him with a more passionate
love than he had ever felt for her yet--and at his worst he had loved
her.
“Maude,” he cried, in a sudden access of mingled rage and despair, “why
do you goad me to say these things? I know how detestable I seem to you.
And yet, as there is a heaven above me, I have loved you truly from
first to last. Pity me if, while I prayed for no better fate than to
face the enemy’s guns on an Indian battle-field, I was a coward in
social life and dared not brave genteel poverty even for your sake. Pity
me if I shrank from thrusting myself between you and a wealthy marriage.
I had been poor all my life; and I knew what you have never learnt--the
horrors of a gentleman’s poverty. I have smiled at your girlish talk of
pretty cottages and tiny suburban gardens; an elegant little
drawing-room, in which you and I might spend the winter evenings
together with our books and music. The poor gentleman’s cottage is never
pretty; the poor gentleman’s drawing-room is never elegant. His wife’s
tastes may be ever so simple, his own aspirations may be ever so pure;
but poverty countenances no taste, permits no aspiration. His wife is
fond of music, perhaps. Heaven help her! she cannot be sure of an hour
in which her piano may not be seized by the broker. She delights in
flowers; but the nosegays she arranges so gaily to-day may entail a writ
for the florist’s account to-morrow. You would have thought me a model
of all that is noble and disinterested if I had exposed you to such
miseries as these: you think me a scoundrel because I was not selfish
enough to say to you, ‘Reject Francis Tredethlyn and a life of elegant
ease, and accept my devotion and an existence of penury and trouble.’”
“And you ask me now to fulfil my broken promise? Have you inherited a
fortune? or how is it that your ideas upon matrimony have altered?”
The schemer flushed crimson to the roots of his hair, and then grew
deadly pale. For the life of him he could not answer that question. He
could not say, “_My_ position is unchanged, but _you_ are rich. Give me
your fortune and the heart I did not choose to claim when it was
unaccompanied by fortune.”
“Had we not better wish each other good morning, Mr. Lowther?” Maude
said, after a little pause. “Your visit is ill-timed and most unwelcome.
Your presence reminds me of a cruel wrong done to a noble friend, a
devoted husband, whose worth I have learned only too late; whom I have
loved unconsciously, only to discover the depth of my affection when its
object is lost to me for ever.”
“You loved your husband!” cried Harcourt, with a cynical laugh; “you
seem determined to astonish me to-day. You loved your husband?”
“Yes--dearly and truly; and love his memory better than ever I loved
you. I have learned to think, since I have been released from your
influence; for it was your influence that regulated my life as well as
my husband’s; it was your influence that kept us asunder, and plunged
both of us into a whirlpool of dissipation. I have had time to think
during the long miserable days and nights in which I have watched for
the coming of him who was never to return to me; and if I had not
discovered the shallowness of your love before my marriage, I should
have made that discovery since. You are base enough to tell me that the
world has linked my name with yours. I can afford to despise a world in
which I have never found real happiness, and in which I no longer wish
to hold a place. I shall go back to my father’s house, and my life will
be one long atonement for the past. I tell you this, Mr. Lowther, in
order that you may understand that we must be strangers to each other
henceforward.”
She laid her hand upon the bell as she spoke. Harcourt Lowther stood for
some moments looking at her. A strange compound of passionate admiration
and vengeful fury flamed in his eyes.
“I have sometimes wondered at the madmen who murder the women they have
loved; but God help you, Maude Tredethlyn, if I had a loaded pistol in
my pocket to-day!”
He folded his arms, locking them together with a convulsive suddenness,
as if he could only thus restrain the impulse by which he would have
struck her down where she stood defying him; and then he turned, and
slowly left the room.
He had left his hired horse in the quiet street, in charge of a boy; but
the boy’s back was turned when his employer left the house, and Harcourt
Lowther drove back to town in a hansom. It was only when his brother
reminded him of the horse, that he remembered how he had gone to
Stuccoville; and sent a man to recover the missing steed. After that he
left the noisy regions of the Strand, and wandered across one of the
bridges out to some dismal waste ground in the neighbourhood of
Battersea; a remote and forgotten tract, that was almost as lonely as an
African desert: there he laid himself down amongst the rubbish of a
deserted brickfield, and cried like a child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XLI.
SUSAN’S GOOD NEWS.
Maude Tredethlyn sat alone in her spacious chamber: oh, so spacious, so
splendid, so dreary, so ghastly, with a tall carved walnut-wood bedstead
that was like one of the tombs in Père la Chaise, only not so lively,
and with long panels of looking-glass shimmering ghost-like in dark
walnut-wood wardrobes and armoires, and _duchesse_ dressing-tables. She
might have endured her troubles better, perhaps, if her room had been
furnished with white and gold rather than so much funereal walnut-wood
and ghastly looking-glass. She sat alone, thinking of the husband whom
she had lost, and whose worth she had only discovered when it was too
late. She would accept sympathy from no one. Julia wrote her letters,
and saw people who must be seen, and was very good; but the wayward
heart shrank away from her in its sudden desolation. She had loved
him--she had loved him--and had been ashamed to confess her real
feelings either to herself or to the people who had smiled upon a
mercenary marriage as if it was the most natural thing under heaven; but
who would have lifted their eyebrows in scornful surprise had they known
that she could care for a person whose boyhood had been spent in a
humble old homestead among the Cornish moorlands. Gliding gracefully
through her frivolous life, tolerably happy in a shallow kind of way,
with more shopping, and driving, and riding, and calling, and
kettle-drumming, and dinner-giving, and horticultural-fête attending,
always to be done than it was in the power of any one woman to do,
except by a perpetual scramble, she had found no time to consider her
position, no time to be aware how entirely even her most frivolous
pleasures depended on the faithful minister whom no influence could
entirely divide from her.
Amongst the papers she had looked over on the library shelves and
tables, where the dust lay thick, she had sometimes found a sheet of
perfumed note-paper, and a list of items in her own writing--commissions
she had given Francis to execute, troublesome ones sometimes, involving
loss of time, and patient inquiry amongst West-end emporiums--orders for
new books, drawing materials, ferns, music, all the frivolities of her
life. She remembered with a cruel pang of remorse how faithfully the
smallest details had been remembered, how patiently the most tiresome