CHAPTER XVIII
.
POOR FRANCIS.
From the second day of the New Year things went pleasantly enough in the Twickenham household. How could Maude do otherwise than rejoice in the salvation of her father’s honour--to say nothing of his commercial prosperity--even though that salvation had been obtained by a great humiliation on her own part? She would have borne that humiliation very willingly, and would have freely acknowledged her obligation to Francis Tredethlyn, could she have seen Julia Desmond reconciled to her lover. But the separation between these two, which had arisen out of the scene on New Year’s night, was a perpetual reproach to Maude Hillary.
She was not able to be quite happy, therefore, even though such a terrible burden had been lifted from her,--even though she saw the dark cloud swept away from her father’s face. Her girlish frivolity had departed from her for ever on that terrible night in her father’s study at Brighton; and there was a womanly softness, a pensive tenderness in her manner now, that made her even more bewitching than of old. Her affection for her father--always the ruling passion of her simple mind--had been intensified by that fiery ordeal through which she had so lately passed; and there was something very beautiful in the union which now existed between the father and daughter. Mr. Hillary had been surprised into confidences that made a new tie between himself and his child. He could never again entirely withheld his secrets from that tender friend and consoler. He could never again think of her as a beautiful, frivolous creature, only intended to wear expensive dresses and float about in graceful attitudes amongst the costly _bric-à-brac_ of a fashionable drawing-room. He had learned to trust his child; and poor Maude applied herself diligently to the study of the customs and dealings common in that mysterious region known to her as the City. She tried to understand her father’s position--for she was tormented by a feverish anxiety as to the repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds; but the complications of an Australian merchant’s trade, as affected by wars, and rumours of wars, by alterations in the rate of discount and the price of Consols, were a little beyond Miss Hillary’s comprehension, and she was fain to give up the attempt in despair, and to accept any statement which her father cared to make to her respecting the altered aspect of his affairs.
There was less company at the Cedars than usual during the bleak early months of the year. Mr. Hillary worked very sedulously in the City during this time, and did not care to fill his house with frivolous young idlers or ponderous City-bred matrons and their fashionably-educated daughters. The recklessness engendered by the contemplation of inevitable ruin had given place to the careful dealing of a man who has a difficult but not impossible task allotted to him. You can scarcely expect the daughters of King Danäus to labour very arduously in the filling of those buckets which they _know_ will not hold water; but if the buckets are only thin at the bottom, and _may_ possibly carry their contents safely to the well, it is worth while to work conscientiously.
Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds had done wonders for Lionel Hillary; but the dry-rot had been for a long time at work in that stately ship of which the merchant was captain, and the successful navigation of the vessel, amidst all the rocks and shoals and tempests of the commercial ocean, was by no means an easy duty.
But Mr. Hillary was sanguine, and his daughter saw the new hopefulness and brightness of his face, and was very nearly happy. She was not quite happy, for Harcourt Lowther’s letters grew more despondent and complaining by every mail. He reproached Maude Hillary for her prosperity and her indifference; she must be indifferent, he argued, or she would have succeeded ere this in obtaining her father’s consent to her marriage with the penniless officer. “There are girls who will go through fire and water for the man they love,” he wrote in an epistle that was half filled with fierce reproaches. “I have seen the power of a woman’s devotion; but then _that_ woman was only a poor simple creature, and not the daughter of a millionaire. I cannot believe that you could fail to influence your father, if you really cared to do so. If you loved me, Maude, this business would have been settled long ago.”
Did she love him? That was a question which she had never set herself to answer. Had they not engaged themselves to each other in the prettiest and most sentimental fashion, like a modern Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton? Maude took the fact of her love for granted. All the sweetest and tenderest dreams of her life were mingled with the memory of Harcourt Lowther. He was so superior to all the other men who had paid her their homage; and it may be that his contemptuous bearing towards those other men had been a part of the fascination of his manner. He had affected that modern Edgar Ravenswood tone--that elegant Timon of Athens-ism--which is so intensely charming in the eyes of a very young woman, however spurious it may be. And with all this, he had been so devoted, so delightfully exacting, so deliciously jealous! Maude looked back to the one sentimental period of her life, and saw Harcourt Lowther’s image radiant in all the light of her own youthful fancies. So the worshipper in a village chapel sees some poor painted wooden figure of a saint glorified by the glitter of tapers, the brightness of flowers and draperies and decorations. How was she to separate the lamps and the flowers about the shrine from the image which they adorned? How was she to discover the paltry nature of that clay out of which the graceful figure was fashioned? Harcourt Lowther represented to her all that was brightest and best in her early girlhood; and sitting alone, through long and thoughtful hours, in the empty rooms at the Cedars, Maude Hillary brooded very sadly upon the only love-story of her life.
She had ventured to speak of Harcourt to her father once since the beginning of the year; but her timid pleading had been met by a cruel repulse.
“Understand me at once and for ever, Maude,” Lionel Hillary said, sternly; “such a marriage as that can never be. If you were the great heiress people think you, I might gratify this whim, as I have gratified other fancies, foolish and extravagant in their way. But the road I am now treading is by no means too secure under my feet, and I cannot afford to see my only child the wife of a penniless adventurer. I want to see you happy, Maude, but not after a sentimental girl’s notion of happiness. I know what all those pretty theories about a suburban cottage and poverty come to when they are put into practice. I have seen the slipshod maid-of-all-work, and the miserable dinners, and the Kidderminster carpets, and stale bread and rank butter, that belong to love in a cottage. And more than this, Maude, I know that Harcourt Lowther is the very last man to ally himself to a dowerless wife.”
“Ah, how little you know him!” Maude murmured, softly. She thought she knew her lover so well herself, and fancied him the most generous and devoted of men because he had given her a few half-guinea bouquets, purchased on credit from a confiding florist. “Ah, dear papa, how little you know him! He is always reproaching me with my fortune, and lamenting the gulf it has made between us. Let me tell him of your difficulties; let me tell him that I am no longer a millionaire’s daughter, that I am free to marry the man I love. Ah, let me tell him----”
“Not a word, Maude,” answered Lionel Hillary--“not a word to that man, if you have any love or respect for your father. Remember that I have trusted you with secrets that a man seldom confides to his daughter.”
“And your confidence shall be sacred, papa,” Miss Hillary replied, submissively. And thus ended her intercession in favour of Harcourt Lowther.
She was fain to be contented, however, remembering the great trouble which had been so near her, and which a merciful hand had lifted away. She was fain to remember, shudderingly, the feverish horror of that night at Brighton, and to think gratefully of Francis Tredethlyn, to whom she owed her father’s rescue. She was grateful to him; but she could not put entirely away from her the sense of shame left by that
## scene in the study, and Julia Desmond’s passionate reproaches. She could
not forget that it was for her sake Francis Tredethlyn had helped her father, and that the burden of a great obligation must rest upon her shoulders until that loan of twenty thousand pounds was repaid. Poor Maude’s unbusiness-like mind entirely ignored any such thing as interest for Mr. Tredethlyn’s money. She only thought of the loan itself, and the question of its repayment was perpetually in her mind. Had she not been the suppliant, at whose suit the money had been lent? and was she not in a manner the actual debtor?
Things were much better in the City, her father told her; but upon two or three occasions when she had ventured to hint her anxiety respecting the early repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s money, the merchant’s answers had filled her mind with vague disquietude. There was an indifference in Mr. Hillary’s manner that alarmed Maude’s keen sense of right and honour.
“Tredethlyn is too well off to want his money in any desperate hurry, my dear,” he said; “he is not likely to become a very pressing creditor.”
The hedgerows about Isleworth and Twickenham were green, with their earliest buds before Francis Tredethlyn came again to the Cedars. Mr. Hillary had called upon the young man at his hotel several times before he succeeded in seeing him, and had only with great difficulty wrung from him an admission of the fact that he was the anonymous lender of the twenty thousand pounds that had saved the merchant from ruin and disgrace.
“My dear Tredethlyn, why should you insist upon any disguise?” Mr. Hillary said, with a pleasant ease that not every man could have maintained in such a position as that in which the merchant found himself with regard to this simple-minded, country-bred Crœsus. “Is it not enough to have been the most generous of men, without trying to carry generosity to the verge of Quixotism? How can I doubt the identity of my preserver? I know that Maude betrayed my necessities to you, under the excitement of those unfortunate theatricals, and I know that loans of twenty thousand pounds do _not_ drop from the skies. My dear fellow, I am most heartily thankful to you for what you have done. It was a very noble thing to do, an action that any man might be proud of doing. If I had ever doubted your having good blood in your veins, your conduct in this one matter would have settled my doubts. But I never did doubt it, my dear Tredethlyn. I have recognized you from the first as a gentleman; not by the right of an accidental thirty thousand a year, scraped out of all manner of commercial gutters by a miserly uncle; but by virtue of some of the best blood in the West of England.”
And then Mr. Hillary stretched out both his hands, and shook those of Francis Tredethlyn in his vigorous grasp; and altogether the interview could scarcely have been more entirely satisfactory had the merchant written a cheque for the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. Indeed, to Francis any immediate repayment of that money would have been a grievous mortification. Was it not delightful to him to remember that he had been of service to _her_ father? Was not the money advanced to the merchant a kind of link between Maude and the man who loved her so dearly and so hopelessly,--only a very sordid, earthy link; but better than none?
“I offended her very much that night,” Francis thought; “but perhaps she will forgive me, and remember me kindly, when she thinks that I have been useful to her father.” But when Mr. Hillary begged Francis to renew his visits to Twickenham, the young man resisted those friendly invitations as obstinately as if the Cedars had been the most obnoxious place upon earth. He could not muster up courage to encounter Maude Hillary after that scene in the little study. What if he had offended too deeply for forgiveness? What if she slew him with a frozen glance from her lovely eyes? Again and again in his lonely rides, emboldened by the dusky twilight of the early spring evenings, he had ventured to haunt the neighbourhood of the old brick-built mansion by the river; but he could not bring himself to go any nearer to the shrine of his divinity; and he made all manner of lame excuses in answer to Mr. Hillary’s cordial invitations.
He was only a clod; only an uneducated rustic, newly cast upon a strange world, open to all the pleasant snares which are laid for the simple-minded possessor of thirty thousand a year. Heaven only knows the perils and temptations into which some young men would have fallen under similar circumstances. It is something in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour that his worst mistake was to fall desperately in love with Maude Hillary, and wear his horse’s shoes out in disconsolate rides about the twilit lanes and roads in the neighbourhood of her dwelling-place.
And in the mean time Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon were supposed to be busily employed in their search for the missing girl, who might or might not have any right to another name than that of Susan Tredethlyn. Very little came of the lawyers’ endeavours. Several advertisements had been inserted in the “Times;” but it is to be feared that the lost and missing advertised for in those columns are too often wanderers in a weary region, far removed from that comfortable sphere of life in which the morning papers are punctually delivered to enliven the breakfast-table. No reply came to any of those mysteriously-worded appeals to Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin which were concocted by the young man and his legal advisers; and the image of the friendless girl grew paler and fainter day by day in the mind of Maude Hillary’s adorer.
At last Fortune--who will generally do anything in the world for us, if we have patience enough to wait her own time for doing it--brought about the result which Francis Tredethlyn had so obstinately avoided, yet so fondly desired. Lounging against the rails one brilliant April day at the corner opposite Apsley House, Francis saw Maude Hillary’s carriage drive into the Park.
Yes, there she was, with her sunny hair framed in spring blossoms and white areophane. The young man seemed to behold the vision of an angel in a Parisian bonnet, and half wondered if the folds of her white burnous were not a pair of downy pinions floating away from her divine shoulders. He grew very red and uncomfortable, and in another moment would have yielded to the impulse that prompted him to seek refuge in flight; but before he could do so, the carriage was close to the rails, Maude Hillary had recognized him, and had told the coachman to stop.
She was not offended with him, then; she forgave him, and thought of him kindly. His heart swelled with a rapture that was almost overpowering. Ah! _this_ was love. How different from that placid sense of affection with which he had regarded his cousin, Susy! how much more delicious! how infinitely more painful!
“I have wanted so much to see you, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Maude said, after shaking hands with her bewildered adorer; “why have you never been to Twickenham?”
“I--I--don’t like--I thought you were angry with me,” stammered Francis, very awkwardly. Ah, how sad it is that the presence of those we love best, and in whose eyes we would most desire to appear at an advantage, should entail upon us the annihilation of anything like ease or grace of manner! Mr. Tredethlyn felt himself becoming purple and apoplectic, under the influence of that seraphic creature, whose image had filled his mind unceasingly for the last six months.
“Angry with you!” exclaimed Maude; “how should I be otherwise than grateful to you, when I remember how good you have been to papa? Believe me, Mr. Tredethlyn, I am not too proud to own the extent of our obligation. I thank you most sincerely. You can never know how grateful I am for the service you have rendered my dear father.”
She bent her head, and the spring-flowers in her bonnet were very near him as she said this in a low, earnest voice. But in the next moment the memory of that uncomfortable scene in the study flashed back upon her, and she felt that she must always be more or less in a false position with regard to Francis Tredethlyn. She made a little effort to set herself right before she parted from him.
“You have seen Julia; you and she are reconciled, I hope. Mr. Tredethlyn?”
“No; indeed, I have never heard from her since--since I left the Cedars. Your papa told me that she----Oh, Miss Hillary, I think it was better that we should part. I don’t think that we had either of us ever really cared for each other. It was better that it should end as it did.”
“But I would give so much to find Julia, to hear where she is.”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head hopelessly. He had a vague idea that he had not done his very uttermost in his search for his cousin Susan, and he recoiled with terror from the idea of having to engage in a hunt for Miss Desmond.
“Good-bye, Mr. Tredethlyn; I hope that all will come right, after all; and I hope that you will believe I am grateful for your goodness to my father.”
She held out her hand, and the Cornishman took it in his own with almost as reverential a touch as if it had been some relic handed to him from an altar. The carriage drove off immediately after this, and Francis saw that seraphic bonnet with the spring-blossoms melt away and lose itself among mundane bonnets. He lingered at the rails till the carriage came back again, and still lingered after that, thinking that Miss Hillary’s equipage would again return to Hyde-Park Corner; but after out-watching all the loungers by the rails, and seeing the last of the carriages leaving the Ladies’ Mile, he was fain to go home, resigned to the obvious fact that Maude Hillary had left the Park by the Kensington gates on her homeward route.
He went home, but not disconsolate. Had he not seen and spoken with that divinity before whom he was the simplest worshipper who ever bowed before any earthly shrine? Was he not assured of her forgiveness? nay, even of her gratitude? Her gratitude--Maude Hillary’s gratitude, in exchange for that vile dross which he had ever held so lightly. Money was indeed good for something, if it could buy the rapture of that little interview across the park-rail, in which Francis had played so very poor a part. He went home, and carried Maude Hillary’s image with him, and walked up and down his big sitting-room in the Covent Garden Hotel, smoking a cigar and thinking of the woman he loved: he thought of her quite as hopelessly as ever _Claude Melnotte_ could have thought of _Pauline_ before _Beauseant’s_ diabolical suggestions had prompted him to his treacherous wooing. He thought of her as innocently as a schoolboy thinks of the stage fairy-queen in a Christmas pantomime, and no ambitious or selfish dream had any abode in his mind; only when a brief note reached him from Lionel Hillary, renewing the old unceremonious invitation to the Cedars, poor Francis could no longer resist the voice of the charmer, but was fain to pack his portmanteau and drive down to the merchant’s office, whence Mr. Hillary was to convey him in the mail phaeton to Twickenham. She was not angry with him, and he might bask in the sunshine of her presence! For a little while he might enjoy the dangerous delight, and then the officer to whom she was betrothed would come back to claim her, and there would be a wedding at the old church by the Thames; and he, Francis, would see his divinity radiant in bridal robes and crowned with orange-flowers before he departed for ever into the outer darkness where she was not.
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