CHAPTER XXI

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HARCOURT LOWTHER’S WELCOME.

Within a month from that night on which the merchant’s daughter and Francis Tredethlyn had lingered so long together on the terrace up the river, Maude Hillary sat at her desk in the little study, trying to begin the most difficult letter she had ever had occasion to write.

The letter was to be addressed to Harcourt Lowther, and the three words, “My dear Harcourt,” were already written on the rose-tinted foreign note-paper; but beyond those preliminary words Maude found it very difficult to proceed.

That which she had to tell the distant soldier, sorely tried by inglorious idleness in a penal settlement, and inclined to resent every stroke of ill-fortune, was by no means a pleasant thing to tell. She had to announce to him that the promise she had made long ago in the twilight by the river had been deliberately broken. She had to tell him that she was the plighted wife of another man; and she was not free to reveal to him any one of the strange circumstances that had pressed so cruelly upon her, pushing her, little by little, into this renunciation of her first and only love.

It was only a very commonplace letter that Miss Hillary could write to her discarded lover. She could only tell the old, common story, and put in the hackneyed pleas so often heard in the court of Cupid;--her father’s wishes: her desire to secure his happiness rather than her own; and then a wild womanly prayer for pity: an entreaty that her lover would believe in the existence of stronger reasons--higher motives--the nature of which she was not free to reveal. And last of all, after many pages of passionate supplication for pardon, with not a little violation of the nicer laws propounded by Lindley Murray and his successors,--at the very last there came one page blotted with tears, earnest yet incoherent, in which Miss Hillary implored Mr. Lowther to forget her, and to seek happiness with a happier woman. Never had she loved him so dearly as while she wrote that last page, in which she resigned him for ever. Surely Queen Guinevere’s diamonds must have sparkled their very brightest just in that one angry moment in which she flung them into the river.

Yes, it had come to this. Maude Hillary, like a modern Iphigenia, had sacrificed herself for the benefit of her father. The burden of that debt which had been incurred by her agency had weighed too heavily upon her girlish breast. Somehow or other Francis Tredethlyn must be paid; and since he loved her so devotedly, so foolishly--since he held her as the brightest treasure to be won by aspiring man--it was surely better that he should take this poor recompense than go altogether unrewarded. It may be that Maude Hillary would under no circumstances deliberately have broken faith with her betrothed lover. But these grand crises, upon which the fate of a lifetime may depend, are apt to come very suddenly upon us. The great flood-tide of fate arises, and carries away the weak creatures afloat on its resistless waters. A moment of hesitation--a few faltering words--half doubtful, half imploring, and the thing is done.

It had all happened on the day on which Francis Tredethlyn accepted Mr. Hillary’s magnanimous offer, and allowed himself to be created a sleeping partner in the Australian house. It was only natural that on such a day Francis should dine at the Cedars; and it was only natural that Lionel Hillary should make a little speech about the young man, telling his daughter of the generosity of this noble-minded Cornishman, who had been something more than a son to him--a friend, a benefactor, a preserver. What praise could be loud enough for a man who would lend thirty thousand pounds without security? And then this noble-minded Cornishman, whose heart was like a great lump of tinder--only wanting the feeblest spark to kindle it into a blaze--burst out into a passionate declaration of his love. What was his fortune but so much dirt, which he was only too glad to fling under the feet of Miss Hillary? Would he not go out into the world to-morrow penniless, barefoot, a beggar, if by so doing he could add to her happiness? He asked a few such questions as these: and then cried out suddenly that he was a despicable wretch, and that he was ashamed of himself for saying all this, when he knew that Miss Hillary’s heart was given to another man. He would go, he said; she should never again be tormented by him. She should not be annoyed by so much as the mention of his name. After which passionate speech Mr. Tredethlyn grasped the merchants hand, and then made a rush towards the door. He would fain have suited the action to the word; he wanted to go away that moment, and hide himself for ever from Maude Hillary. But before he could reach the door Maude was by his side, with her hands clasped about his arm her face looking upward at his, and drowned with tears.

“How good you are!” she cried. “Don’t go away; we cannot part from you like this. You have been so good to my father. Ah, how can we ever recompense so much devotion! If my esteem--my gratitude--can make you happy, they are yours,--they have long been yours. I renounce every other thought, every other duty. I can have no duty higher than this.”

The last words were almost stifled on her lips, for Francis Tredethlyn caught her to his breast as passionately as in that last scene of the “Lady of Lyons.”

“Maude, my love--my angel--you will renounce, for my sake--you--you--will be my own--my wife!” he gasped, incoherently. “No--no, I cannot accept such a sacrifice--I am not so mean, so selfish, as to----”

But Mr. Hillary, hovering over his daughter and the generous-minded young Cornishman, would not allow Francis to finish this sentence.

“My dear boy!” he exclaimed,--“my darling Maude! nothing upon earth could give me greater pleasure than this, because I know that it is for your mutual happiness. What joy can be deeper or purer than that of a father who knows that his child has won for herself the devoted affection of a good man?”

“And the thirty thousand pounds will be sunk for ever and ever in the firm of Hillary and Co.,” the merchant may have thought at the close of that enthusiastic address.

Thus it was that Maude Hillary arrived at the very point towards which fate and her father had been pushing her for the last twelve months. After that passionate impulse of self-sacrifice had passed away, a dull dead feeling of pain took possession of her breast. Alone in the quiet of her own pretty rooms; alone through the long sunny July mornings with her books, and Berlin-wool work, and piano, she had only too much time to consider the step she had taken; she had only too much time to think of her broken vows, her scattered hopes. And she did think of these things,--with cruel remorse and self-upbraiding, with bitter and unavailing regret.

And now Francis Tredethlyn appeared to her all at once in a new light. Alas! he was no longer the noble-hearted friend to whom she could appeal for help in the day of trouble. He was no longer the humble adorer, kneeling on the lowest step of the altar, remote and submissive. He was her affianced husband, and he had a right to her society. He had a right to attend her in her walks and rides, to linger near the piano when she sang, to hold perpetual skeins of Berlin-wool during those tedious morning visits which he made now and again to the Cedars. All these privileges were his by right; and other people gave place when he approached Miss Hillary, and watched to see her face brighten as he drew near her. It was not that Francis himself was in any way altered. His adoration of his bright divinity was no less humble than of old--even now when he knew that the goddess was to descend from her pedestal and exchange her starry crown for the orange-blossoms of an earthly bride. He was in no way changed; the distance between himself and Maude Hillary was as wide as ever. He could set it before him--a palpable gulf, across which he beheld her, a strange creature, in a strange land,--a creature who might hold out her hand to him once in a way across the impassable abyss, but who could never draw him near her. Alas for Francis Tredethlyn’s loveless betrothal! that dreary distance was growing wider every day, now that Iphigenia knew the hour of sacrifice was drawing near.

It had been one thing to think of Mr. Tredethlyn as a friend--a dear and devoted friend, worthy to be regarded with an almost sisterly affection. It was another thing to contemplate him as a future husband. All his ignorance, his homely ways of speaking and thinking, his little awkwardnesses and stupidities, his vacillating temperament in the matter of spoons and forks at those elaborate Russian dinners,--all these things pained Maude Hillary now as cruelly as they had galled Miss Desmond’s proud spirit some six months before. And then to the faint shivering pain of disgust was joined all the bitterness of contrast. Never had Harcourt Lowther’s image seemed so near to this wayward girl as it seemed now, when she was the promised wife of another man, and tried most honestly to shut the memory of her old lover completely out of her mind. Never had he been so near to her. His graces of manner, his accomplishments, the light touch of his pointed fingers on the piano, the deep organ-tone that he alone amongst amateurs could draw out of a flute, the free outlines of his pencil, the transparency of his water-colour sketches, the graphic humour of his pen-and-ink caricatures; the airy wit, which never verged upon vulgarity; the fervid eloquence, which never degenerated into rant; the trenchant satire, which never sank to the vile level of personal spite: she thought of her discarded lover: and all the showy attributes that had won her girlish love arose before her in cruel contrast with the deficiencies of Francis Tredethlyn.

Yet all this time she was very kind to her betrothed husband. It was not in her to be scornfully indifferent to the man whom she regarded as her father’s friend and benefactor. She was not a woman to sacrifice herself with an ill grace. The silent warfare went on within her breast. She struggled and suffered, but she had always the same kind, cold smile, the same gentle words for the man whom she had promised to marry.

And in the meantime the hands went steadily round upon all the clock-dials, and the inevitable hour drew very near. Busy milliners and dressmakers, bootmakers and outfitters, came backwards and forwards from Wigmore Street to the Cedars, and were busy and glad. Mr. Hillary’s credit was unlimited, and it was almost as if a princess of the blood royal had been about to marry. Francis Tredethlyn bought the lease of a big black-looking house in a new neighbourhood near Hyde Park: and there were negotiations pending for the purchase of an estate within a few miles of Windsor.

August was melting into September. Already there were bright glimpses of red and yellow here and there among the sombre green of the woodlands. The wedding was to take place very early in October: the guests were bidden, the dresses of the bridesmaids were chosen, and in the still evening Iphigenia walked alone on the terrace. She was very seldom alone at this hour; but to-night her father had taken Francis Tredethlyn to a club-dinner, given by a bachelor stockbroker of some eminence in Mr. Hillary’s circle. To-night Maude was alone; and leaning upon the broad balustrade, with her elbow resting amongst the thick ivy that crept along the stone, she looked down at the still water--the dark melancholy water--and thought of her past life.

It seemed so far away from her now, left so entirely behind--all that frivolous past. She seemed to have grown out of herself since the knowledge of her father’s troubles had come upon her; and looking backwards she saw a careless and happy creature, who bore no relationship to this thoughtful woman, before whom all the future seemed a blank and dreary country, unillumined by one glimpse of sunshine.

She turned away from the water presently, and walked slowly up and down the long terrace. There seemed to be a melancholy influence in the evening stillness, the dusky shadow lying upon every object, the distant peal of bells floating across the river from some church where the ringers were practising; even the voices of passing boatmen and the low monotonous splash of oars took a pensive tone, in unison with the hour and Maude Hillary’s sad remorseful thoughts.

She was near the end of the terrace, close to that ivy-grown old summerhouse which had sheltered the patched and powdered beauties of King George the Second’s Court, when she was startled by the sound of a chain grating against stone-work, and rapid steps on the flight of stairs leading from the terrace to the river. The young men who came to the Cedars were very fond of making the journey by water: so there was nothing strange in the sound of a step on the river stair. Maude turned to meet the intruder with a sense of weariness and vexation. He would not be likely to stay long, whoever he was; but the prospect of even ten minutes’ idle conventional discourse jarred upon her present frame of mind.

She turned to meet the unwelcome visitor with a languid sigh, and saw a man hurrying towards her in the twilight; a man in whose figure and dress there was a careless grace, an undefinable air of distinction, which, in Maude Hillary’s eyes, stamped him as different from all the rest of the world.

He came hurrying towards her. In a moment he was close to her, holding out his arms, eager to take her to his breast. But she recoiled from him, deadly white, and with her hands extended, motioning him back.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried; “don’t come near me. Ah, you don’t know--you cannot have had my letter.”

“What letter?” cried Mr. Lowther, staring almost fiercely at the shrinking girl. These sort of things so rapidly make themselves understood. Harcourt Lowther saw at once that something was wrong. “What letter?”

“My last; the letter in which I told you that----Ah, how you will hate and despise me! But if you could know all, Harcourt, as you never can, you might excuse--you might forgive----”

A torrent of sobs broke the sentence.

“Oh, I think I understand,” said Harcourt Lowther, very quietly. “You have thrown me over, Miss Hillary.”

She held out her clasped hands towards him with an imploring gesture; and then in broken sentences, in half-finished phrases, that were rendered incoherent by her sobs, she recapitulated something of her letter of explanation. Mr. Lowther’s face had blanched before this, and his lower lip quivered now and then with a little spasmodic action; but he listened very quietly to all Maude had to say.

“I ought never to have expected anything else,” he answered, when she had finished her piteous attempt to explain and justify her conduct without revealing her father’s commercial secrets. “I don’t know that I ever _did_ expect anything else,” he went on very deliberately. “What has a penniless younger son to do among the children of Mammon? How can the earthen pot hope to sail down the stream with the big brazen vessels, and escape wreck and ruin? Don’t let there be any scene between us, Miss Hillary; I hate all domestic tragedy, and I think if my heart were breaking--and men’s hearts _have_ been known to break--I could take things quietly. You have grown tired of our long and apparently hopeless engagement, and you have promised to marry somebody else. It is all perfectly natural. May I know the name of my fortunate rival?”

“His name is Tredethlyn--Francis Tredethlyn.”

“A Cornishman,” added Harcourt Lowther,--“a fellow who has lately come into a great fortune?”

“Yes. You know him, then?”

“Intimately. I congratulate you on your choice, Miss Hillary. Francis Tredethlyn is a most excellent fellow. I have reason to speak well of him, for he was my servant for a year and a half out yonder in Van Diemen’s Land.”

“Your servant?”

“Yes. He was really the best of fellows; and in the art of brushing a coat or cleaning a pair of riding-boots was positively unrivalled.”

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