CHAPTER XX
.
AN EXPLANATION.
Francis Tredethlyn, now so frequent a visitor at the Cedars, happened to present himself there upon the day after that on which Maude had come to an understanding with her father. The young man rode down to Twickenham in the afternoon, and found Miss Hillary occupied with two croquet-playing young ladies and a croquet-playing young gentleman, whose manners and opinions were of the same insipidly flaxen hue as their hair and eyebrows.
There was a tired look in Maude’s face that afternoon, which was very perceptible to Francis Tredethlyn, although quite invisible to the neutral-tinted croquet-players. Her eyes wandered away sometimes from the balls and mallets, and fixed themselves, with a sad, dreamy look, upon the sunlit river or the distant woodland. Francis saw this, and that faithful Cornish heart grew heavy in sympathy with Miss Hillary’s unknown trouble. There must be a little of the Newfoundland dog in the nature of a man who can love hopelessly; a little of that superhuman fidelity, a little of that canine endurance which has inspired so many odious comparisons to the disparagement of the inferior animal called man. Francis Tredethlyn’s eyes followed Miss Hillary with a dog-like patience all this afternoon, during which he established himself in the estimation of the flaxen-haired droppers-in as one of the vilest of croquet-players and worst-mannered of men. But the croquet-players departed, after taking tea out of a very ugly Queen-Anne teapot and some old Sèvres cups and saucers, which had been bought for Miss Hillary at the sale of a defunct collector’s goods and chattels, at Messrs. Christie and Manson’s. Francis stayed to dinner, and dined alone with Maude and her father, and found very little to say for himself. He was distracted by the sight of Maude’s pale face and sadly thoughtful eyes. How changed she was from the bright and sparkling creature whom he remembered a few months ago in that house! How changed! What was the secret trouble which had worked that transformation? What could it be except Miss Hillary’s sorrow for the circumstances that divided her from her distant lover? There could be no other cause for her unhappiness, since her father’s commercial difficulties had been smoothed by that twenty thousand pounds so freely advanced to him; and it never occurred to Francis that Maude Hillary could possibly give herself any uneasiness about that money, so lightly parted with by him; nor could he think that any new trouble threatened the merchant’s peace, for Mr. Hillary was specially gay and pleasant this evening.
After dinner Maude strolled out into the garden, and down to that delicious terrace by the river, where the big stone vases of geraniums looked dark and grim in the twilight. She walked slowly up and down the long esplanade with a filmy lace handkerchief tied coquettishly over her head, and her long muslin dress sweeping and rustling after her like the draperies of a fashionably-attired ghost. Francis Tredethlyn furtively watched that white-robed figure in the shadowy distance as he sat at the dinner-table with Mr. Hillary, and would fain have left his glass, filled with the merchant’s rarest Burgundy, for a stroll by the quiet river. Perhaps Mr. Hillary perceived this, for he presently gave the young man his release.
“Since you don’t drink your wine, you may as well go for a stroll in the garden, Tredethlyn,” he said, good-naturedly. “I see Maude yonder; and she’ll be better company for you than I am.”
Francis was by no means slow to take this hint. But once outside the dining-room windows, he went very slowly to the terrace on which Maude was walking. He walked in and out among the flower-beds, making a faint pretence of admiring nature in this twilight aspect. He stopped to caress one of Maude’s Skye terriers. The animals were very fond of him now that he had learned to avoid that trampling on their toes which had been one of the earlier manifestations of his devotion to Miss Hillary. He loitered here and there on every possible pretext, and at last approached the fair deity in the muslin dress with very much the air of a schoolboy, who presents himself in that awful audience-chamber wherein a grim pedagogue is wont to pronounce terrible judgments upon youthful offenders.
He did not know that Miss Hillary had been expecting him all this time; and that her special purpose was to bring him to her side upon that solitary terrace-walk, where she could talk to him freely without fear of eavesdroppers. He did not know that he was quite as much expected as the schoolboy who has been summoned to the parlour, and was to receive a sentence as terrible.
Maude welcomed him very graciously, and for a little while they strolled side by side, talking of the summer’s night, and the flowers, and Skye terriers, and canary-birds, and other subjects equally commonplace and harmless. Then they came to a stop, mechanically, as it is in the nature of people to do when they walk by the side of a river, and looked over the stone balustrade into the still water. And then a death-like silence came down upon them; and Maude Hillary felt that the time had come in which she must utter whatever she had it in her mind to say. It was difficult to begin; but then all her duties of late had been difficult; and upon her knees the night before, in the midst of tearful prayers and meditations, she had resolved that there should be no more sailing under false colours as regarded this young man.
“Dear Mr. Tredethlyn,” she began at last, “you have been so good to my father, so good to me--for to serve him is to render a double service to me--you have been so kind and generous a friend, that I have grown to think of you and trust you almost as I might if you had been my brother.”
Poor Francis listened to this exordium with a very despondent air. Inexperienced as he was in the ways of the world, he was wise enough to know that there was nothing hopeful in such an address as this. When a young lady tells a gentleman that she can regard him as a brother, it is the plainest possible declaration that he can never be anything else. In this case it seemed an uncalled-for act of cruelty, for the Cornishman had never deluded himself by any false hope.
“I think of you almost as if you were my brother,” Maude went on, with heartless repetition of the obnoxious word; “and I cannot help thinking, dear Mr. Tredethlyn, that you are scarcely employing your life as wisely or as well as you might. I don’t think you were ever intended to be an idle man; and again, with such a fortune as yours, a man has scarcely the right to be idle. There are so many people who may be benefited by a rich man’s active life. Oh, forgive me if I seem to lecture you. You will laugh at me, perhaps, and think I want to set myself up as a strong-minded woman, a political economist, or something of that kind. But I only venture to speak to you because I think you waste so much of your time down here, playing billiards with the empty-headed young men who haunt this place, and lounging in the drawing-room to hear the frivolous talk of half-a-dozen idle women, myself among the number.”
She spoke lightly, but she was not the less earnest in her intention; she was only travelling gradually round to the point she wanted to reach.
“But I am so happy here,” cried Francis Tredethlyn. “Ah, if you knew how I have tried to stop away--if you could only know what happiness it is to me to come----”
Maude Hillary interrupted him hastily.
“Yes, I know it is a pleasant life in its way,” she said; “very pleasant and very useless. It is a little new to you perhaps, and seems pleasanter to you on that account. But if you knew what dreary work it is to look back at a long summer season of operas, and concerts, and horticultural meetings, and boat-races, and not to be able to remember one action worthy of being recorded in all that time! I am getting very tired of my present life, Mr. Tredethlyn. It has ceased to be pleasant to me ever since I have known of papa’s difficulties. It is altogether unsuited to me; for I am engaged to marry a poor man, who would bitterly feel the burden of an expensive wife.”
The bolt was launched, and Miss Hillary expected to see some evidence that it had gone home to its mark. But Francis Tredethlyn made no sign. There was just a little pause, and then he said very quietly,--
“Yes, I know that you are to marry a poor man; but with such a wife a man could scarcely remain poor. I suppose it’s only an ignorant foolish notion, but I can’t help thinking that for the sake of the woman he loves, any man could cut his way to fortune. I can always believe in those knights of the olden time, who used to put a badge in their helmets, and then ride off to the wars to do all sorts of miraculous things; and I fancy it must be the same now-a-days, somehow; and that a man who loves truly, and is truly loved again, can achieve anything.”
Maude was inexpressibly relieved by this speech.
“You know of my engagement, then?” she said.
“Yes, I have known it for a very long time.”
“Ah, of course, Julia told you?”
“Yes, it was Miss Desmond who told me.”
“She had a perfect right to do so; there was no reason for any secrecy in the matter. I am very glad that you have known of it. You are so kind a friend that I should not like you to be ignorant of anything nearly relating to my father or myself.”
“It is very good of you to call me a friend,” Francis answered. It seemed to him as if some angelic creature was stooping from her own proper sphere to place herself for a brief interval by his side. “It is very good of you to take any interest in my welfare; and I feel that you are right. The life I lead is utterly idle and useless; but it shall be so no longer. Your father has very generously offered me a grand opportunity of turning both my time and money to account.”
“My father? But how?”
“He has offered me a partnership in his own house.”
“A partnership?--a partnership in his difficulties--his liabilities?” cried Maude, in a tone of horror.
“Those difficulties were only temporary. The thirty thousand I advanced have wiped out all liabilities, and your father’s business stands on a firmer basis than ever.”
“_Thirty_ thousand! You have lent papa thirty thousand pounds?”
“I have not lent it, my dear Miss Hillary. I have only invested it in your father’s business. There is no obligation in the matter, believe me; or if there is, it is all on my side. I get a higher rate of interest for my money than I should get elsewhere.”
He stopped suddenly, for Maude had burst into a passion of sobs.
“Oh, how could he do it? How could he?” she cried. “How could papa take so mean an advantage of your generosity? I love him so dearly, that it almost kills me to think he should be base or dishonourable. I thought the twenty thousand pounds would soon be paid, and instead of that he has borrowed more money of you.”
“My dear Miss Hillary, pray, pray do not distress yourself. Believe me you misunderstand this business altogether. It is not a loan. It is only an equitable and friendly arrangement, quite as advantageous to me as to your father. Upon my word of honour you do Mr. Hillary a cruel wrong when you imagine otherwise.”
Maude dried her tears, and listened to the voice of her consoler. She was so anxious to think well of her father, that she must have been something more than an ignorant, inexperienced girl, if she shut her ears to Francis Tredethlyn’s arguments.
Those arguments were very convincing, very specious. Maude ought, perhaps, to have perceived that they were not the original ideas of Mr. Tredethlyn. She ought, perhaps, to have discovered the parrot-like nature of his discourse respecting all the grand prospects of the house of Hillary and Co.; but she wanted to think well of her father, and Francis Tredethlyn urged her to that conclusion. She listened to his discourse as eagerly as if he had been the most eloquent of living creatures. She felt a kind of tender friendship for him as he talked to her; never before had he seemed so nearly on a level with herself. She wanted to believe in his wisdom; she wanted to respect his sense and judgment, because he was the defender of her father--that beloved father against whom her own conscience had so lately arisen, a stern and pitiless judge.
The quiet river rippled under the summer moonlight before Maude and her companion left the terrace; so much had Francis found to say about the house of Hillary and Co., and the wonderful advantages that must come to him from a partnership in that great firm. Surely his enthusiasm must have arisen from some vague idea that even that commercial alliance would be some kind of link between Miss Hillary and himself. He talked very freely to-night, for Maude’s confidence had set him at his ease; and in almost every word he uttered he naïvely revealed some new depth in his devoted love.
Late that night, when the Cornishman had gone away, Maude stood at her open window, looking out at the river, and thinking of all that Francis Tredethlyn had said to her.
“Harcourt Lowther never loved me as this man loves me,” she thought, sadly. “Ah, what a pity that there should be so much wasted love and devotion in the world!”
And then the thought of Francis Tredethlyn’s thirty thousand pounds arose in her mind,--a terrible obligation, a heavy burden of debt; a debt that was perhaps never to be cancelled.
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