CHAPTER XXIV

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FRANCIS TREDETHLYN’S DISINTERESTED ADVISER.

She was so soon to be his wife! Yes, October was near at hand. Already the woods and hills beyond the Star and Garter were bright with autumnal tints of vivid orange and glowing crimson. The milliners and dressmakers, the outfitters and bootmakers, were perpetually appearing in the hall and on the staircases at the Cedars. Wicker baskets covered with oilskin seemed continually passing in and put of Mr. Hillary’s abode, and Maude could rarely enjoy a quiet half-hour undisturbed by a mysterious summons, entreating her to inspect or try on some garment newly brought home by a “young person” from town. Harcourt Lowther made himself quite at home both at the Cedars and at Francis Tredethlyn’s chambers during this period of preparation. Francis took very kindly to his old master in his new capacity of friend and mentor. The habits of the past made a link between them. The old half-friendly, half-supercilious familiarity which had characterized Harcourt Lowther’s treatment of his servant melted now into a playful and almost caressing friendliness. Mr. Lowther was a thoroughly selfish man, and he found himself called upon in this instance to sacrifice his pride in the cause of his interest. He affected a hearty interest in Francis Tredethlyn’s affairs, and contrived somehow, by a series of manœuvres, so subtle as to be imperceptible, to install himself in the post of chief adviser to the inexperienced young Cornishman. Mr. Lowther was an idle man, a very clever man, too versatile for greatness, or even for any celebrity beyond that species of drawing-room reputation, which women are able to bestow on the men who are not too noble to waste a lifetime in small accomplishments and shallow courtesies. He was very clever, very idle, very much inclined to quarrel with the decrees of Providence; and in Francis Tredethlyn he saw the possessor of the two things he himself most ardently desired--a great fortune, and Maude Hillary for a wife. But he was true to his resolution to take matters quietly; and he assisted in the preparations for the wedding with as much outward show of pleasure as if he had been a match-making mother rejoicing in the happy disposal of a whole brood of daughters. The big mansion in the new district of palatial streets and squares lying between Kensington and Brompton was fitted and furnished under Mr. Lowther’s superintendence. He had meetings with architects, gilders, decorators, and upholsterers; and, with only an occasional reference to Francis, gave his orders as freely as if the house had been his own. Sometimes, walking up and down the whole length of the three drawing-rooms, a strange smile flickered over his face,--a contemplative smile, which faded away in the next moment, giving place to that perfection of fashionable indifference to all things in heaven and earth which was his ordinary expression.

The appointed day came at last, and poor Francis drove down to Twickenham, looking as pale as his light waistcoat, but supported by his friend Harcourt Lowther as best man. Once, and once only, Maude Hillary looked at her discarded lover while she remained Maude Hillary; but there was a world of mingled scorn and reproach in that one look. Ah, how different his love must have been from hers! she thought. Had he forsaken her for a wealthier bride, she would have gone far away from the sound of his wedding bells, and the sight of his wedding finery. In that one look she had seen that he was almost as pale as the bridegroom; but she could not forgive him for being there.

There was all the usual business. Autumnal flowers scattered under the feet of the bride and bridegroom; charity children in clean pinafores cheering in shrill treble voices as the bridal carriage drove away; and then a breakfast, and the popping of champagne corks, and the creaming of delicately perfumed Moselle, and a little speech-making of the mildest character; and then a departure amidst all the confusion of a crowded hall and portico--young-lady intimates pressing forward to caress the bride; loud-voiced young men congratulating the bridegroom; servants with white favours standing on tip-toe to get a peep at the show: and then the postilions crack their whips, and the carriage rolls away through the chill autumn evening; and Maude sees Twickenham town spin by her in a dim glimmer of comfortable firelight, twinkling redly in cottage windows.

The wedding tour had been amongst the many things which Harcourt Lowther had kindly undertaken to plan for his friend; and after a great deal of deliberation, that gentleman had pitched upon one of the dullest and quietest watering-places in Devonshire, as the one spot upon all this earth best suited for Mr. Tredethlyn and his bride.

“You don’t want the stereotyped Continental tour;--the Rhine steamers are crowded with cockneys, who find it easier to spout ‘Childe Harold’ than to regulate the administration of their h’s. What do you know about the castled crag of Drachenfels, dear boy? and what do you care for all the hackneyed sentimentality about beery old knights and battered old castles? You don’t speak any language but your honest native tongue, and you would be bothered out of your life before your travels were over unless you took a courier--and then imagine seeing nature through the eyes of a courier! No, my dear Tredethlyn! the sort of thing for you is some quiet little watering-place,--‘an humble cot, in a tranquil spot, with a distant view of the changing sea,’ and all that sort of thing; in other words, a tranquil little retreat where you and Mrs. Tredethlyn may have time to get acquainted with one another.”

Francis was only too glad to take such pleasant advice. To be alone with Maude, alone beside the still grey sea in the quiet autumn evenings, seemed to him the highest bliss that earth could hold for any human being: and poor Francis blessed his generous friend for the sound judgment which was to secure him such happiness.

“I dare say I should have gone scampering all over the Continent but for you, Lowther,” he said, innocently. “Those other fellows at the Cedars advised a tour through half Europe: ‘See plenty of life,’ they said; ‘freshen yourself up with change of scene, and pick up all the jargon you can out of Murray, so as to be able to hold your own in society. Everybody travels nowadays, and it doesn’t do for a fellow with lots of tin to be behind the rest of the world.’ But I’ll take your advice, Lowther. I wanted Maude to choose the place for our bridal trip, but she wouldn’t; so we’ll go to the Devonshire village.”

It is not to be supposed, of course, that Mr. Lowther had any other than the most friendly intention when he selected Combe Western as the scene of Francis Tredethlyn’s honeymoon; but, on the other hand, it must be confessed that had Harcourt wished to inspire Maude with a weariness of her husband’s society, he could have scarcely selected any place better calculated to assist him in the carrying out of his design. At Combe Western, the misty autumn days were unbroken by any change, save the slow changes of the hours and the gradual darkening of the sky. There were pleasant drives and romantic scenery to be found in the neighbourhood of Combe Western; but Devonshire is a rainy county, and as it rained with little intermission during the whole of that honeymoon period, Francis Tredethlyn’s bride was compelled to find her chief amusement in the prim lodging-house drawing-room and the society of her husband.

And this society was not congenial to her. He was handsome, and pleasant to look at; manly, good-tempered, generous. No mean or unworthy sentiment ever dropped from his lips. She respected him, and was grateful to him; nay, even beyond this, there was a certain latent affection for him lurking in some corner of her heart; but she was very tired of him nevertheless. To be truly attached to a person, and desperately weary of them, is not altogether an impossibility. Are we not sometimes weary of ourselves, whom we yet love so dearly? When you get tired of a book, you have nothing to do but close the volume and restore it to its shelf. But you cannot shut up your friend when he becomes tedious; you must needs go on, wading through page after page of his conversation, till you yawn in his face, and arouse him to the unpleasant conviction that he is a nuisance.

Maude was very gratefully and affectionately disposed towards her father’s benefactor; but she grew terribly tired of his sole companionship during that rainy six weeks in the quiet Devonian watering-place. If the bride and bridegroom had gone on that stereotyped foreign tour so strongly protested against by Harcourt Lowther, Maude’s sunny nature would speedily have asserted itself. She would have found in the rapid changes of scene, in all the pleasant excitement of quick travelling, plenty of subject-matter for conversation with her new companion; there would have been always some common ground on which they could have met, some little incident, among the hundred incidents of a traveller’s day, which would have aroused a sympathy between them. But thrown on their own resources at Combe Western, a Horace Walpole and a Madame du Deffand might have exhausted their conversational powers, and yawned drearily in each other’s faces. Maude found herself wishing for the end of her honeymoon before the first week had drawn to its close; and Francis, always timidly watchful of his wife’s beautiful face, felt a chill anguish at his heart as he perceived her weariness of spirit.

Thus it was that, when they returned to London, the husband and wife were little nearer to each other than on their wedding-day. No pleasant familiarity with each other’s thoughts and feelings had arisen during that dull residence in a dull watering-place. That subtle process of assimilation by which--except in some dismal examples--husband and wife grow like each other in mind and feeling, had not yet begun. They were strangers still; in spite of Maude’s esteem for her husband’s character, in spite of Francis Tredethlyn’s blind idolatry of his wife’s perfections; and Harcourt Lowther, who was one of the guests at their first dinner-party, was not slow to recognize the state of the case.

“You’ll get on admirably together by-and-by, dear boy,” he said to Francis, as they smoked their cigars together in a luxurious little study behind the big library, some days after the great dinner. “You’ll get on superbly with your lovely wife, if you only play your cards cleverly. There must be no Darby and Joan business, you know--no sentimentalism. Lionel Hillary’s daughter is just the woman to be disgusted by that sort of thing. It was all very well, of course, to do the romantic during the honeymoon; but that’s all over now; your wife will go her way, and you’ll go yours. Her friends will absorb a great deal of her time and attention; your friends will absorb you. You’ll have your club, your horses, your men’s parties, and perhaps the House,--for you ought decidedly to get into Parliament,--and it will be utterly impossible for you to spend all your mornings hanging about your wife’s rooms, or nursing her Skye terriers, as you seem to have done hitherto.”

“But I like so much to be with her,” Francis remonstrated, piteously. “It’s very friendly of you to give me these hints, and I dare say you’re right, to some degree. I know Maude used to seem very tired at Combe Western, and we both got into the habit of looking at our watches in a dispiriting kind of way every quarter of an hour; but since we’ve come to London she has quite recovered her spirits, and we are so happy together;--you should have heard her laugh the other morning, when I taught one of the Skyes to shoulder arms with a lead-pencil.”

Mr. Tredethlyn laughed aloud himself at the recollection of this feat. Harcourt Lowther shrugged his shoulders, and a frown, or the passing shadow of a frown, darkened his handsome face.

There are some natures in which there is a certain element of childishness, and between such natures no desperate antagonism is ever likely to arise.

“We were rather dull at Combe Western,” said Mr. Tredethlyn, presently; “but since we’ve been in London we’ve got on capitally. I’ve been everywhere with Maude--shopping even; and I’ve written out the lists for her parties, and been on a round of calls; and, in short, I’ve been the happiest fellow in all creation.”

“No doubt, my dear boy; that sort of thing’s delightful for a fortnight; but look out for the day when the twin demons of satiety and disgust will arise to wither all these Arcadian delights.”

Francis pondered gravely. He had been happy since his return to London, for he had seen Maude bright and lively, pleased with the novelty of her position, happy in her father’s affectionate welcome, serene in the consciousness of pure intentions, and grateful for the devotion, of which some new evidence met her at every turn. Poor Francis had been entirely happy; but it needed only a whisper from an elegant Mephistopheles in modern costume to render this simple Cornishman doubtful even of his own happiness. It might be only a sham and delusion, after all; and Maude’s sunniest smile might be the smile of a victim resigned to the sacrifice.

“If you think that Maude is likely to grow tired----” Francis began, in a very melancholy tone; but Mr. Lowther interrupted him.

“_If_ I think! dear boy. How can I do otherwise than think what is obvious to the dullest apprehension? Take life as other people take it, my dear, simple-minded Tredethlyn, and you’ll find it go smoothly enough with you. Try to live on a plan of your own, and--the rest is chaos.

‘_Il n’est pas de bonheur hors des routes communes: Qui vit à travers champs ne trouve qu’infortunes._’

You had better stick to the vulgar highway, Frank, and not attempt to set up an exceptional _ménage_. No woman will long tolerate a man tied to her apron string. She may be flattered by his devotion in the beginning, but she ends by despising his folly.”

So it was that Francis Tredethlyn began life under the advice of his friend Harcourt Lowther. After that conversation in the study the young husband no longer intruded himself upon his wife’s leisure, or attempted to identify himself with her pursuits. He found plenty to occupy his own time; for Harcourt Lowther always had some new scheme for his friend’s employment or amusement. A race, that no man living in the world could exist without seeing; a horse to be sold at Tattersall’s; a celebrated collection of pictures at Christie and Manson’s; a bachelor’s dinner at a club; a review at Wimbledon;--somehow or other there was always something to be seen, or something to be done, of a nature in which Mrs. Tredethlyn could neither have any part nor feel any interest; and when Francis and his friend dined alone with her, as they did very often, it happened somehow that the conversation was always of a horsy and masculine character, painfully wearisome to the ordinary female mind. If Mr. Lowther had been intent on widening the natural gulf which circumstances had set between these two people, he could scarcely have gone to work more skilfully than he did: though it is of course to be presumed that he was only an unconscious instrument, an involuntary agent of mischief and ruin.

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