CHAPTER XXV

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THE ROAD TO RUIN.

Maude Tredethlyn took her new life very pleasantly. Her father was happy. There had been a reaction in the City; things were going very well for the Australian merchant; and Francis Tredethlyn was receiving handsome interest for his thirty thousand pounds.

He brought these tidings to his wife’s boudoir one morning early in the new year.

“I knew you’d be glad to hear it, Maude,” he said; “and now you see that it _was_ a very fine thing for me to get into your father’s business. So you need not have been uneasy about the matter, my darling.”

Mrs. Tredethlyn lifted herself upon tiptoe, and pursed up the rosiest lips in Christendom. A kiss, transient as the passing flutter of a butterfly’s wing, alighted somewhere amid the thickets of the Cornishman’s beard.

“You dear, good old Francis! That is the pleasantest news I ever heard, except----”

“Except what, darling?”

“The news that papa brought me home a year ago, when a generous friend stepped in between him and ruin.”

Francis Tredethlyn blushed like a schoolgirl.

“Oh, Frank, if I should ever forget that day!” said Maude, in a low voice, that had something of sadness in its tone.

Was she thinking that there had been occasions since her marriage when she _had_ almost forgotten how much she owed to the devotion of her lover,--occasions on which some little social failure--some small omission or commission--some petty sin against the laws of the Belgravians and Tyburnians, had been large enough to blot out all memory of her husband’s goodness? How can you remember that a man has a noble heart, when, for want of the ordinary tact by which the well-bred navigators steer their barks amid the troubled waters of society, he blurts out some unlucky allusion which paralyzes the conversational powers of an entire dinner-table, and brings blight and ruin down upon an assemblage which has fairly promised to be a success? Or how can you be expected to appreciate the generous spirit of a being whose ungainly elbow has just tilted half-a-dozen _petites timbales de gibier_ into the ruby-velvet lap of your most important guest?

There were times when Maude was forgetful of everything except her husband’s genial good-nature and unfailing devotion. There were other times when her heart sank within her as she saw his candid face beaming at her from the remote end of a long dinner-table, and heard his sonorous laugh pealing loud and long above the hushed accents of Belgravia.

He was her slave. If she loved him--and surely it was impossible that she could accept so much idolatry, and render no small tribute of affection in return--her love for him was pretty much of the same quality as that which she bestowed on her favourite Skye terrier.

He was such a dear, devoted creature--so sensible, so obedient; and if he did not quite stand up in a corner to beg, with a bit of bread upon his nose, it was only because he was not required to do so. He was the best of creatures--a big, amiable Newfoundland, ready to lie down in the dirt to be trodden upon by his mistress’s pretty slipper, or to fly at the throat of the foe who dared to assail her. He was a faithful slave and defender, and it was very pleasant to know that he was always at hand--to be patted on the head now and then when he was specially good--to be a little neglected when his mistress was absorbed by the agreeable distractions of society--to be blushed for, and even disowned now and then, when his big awkward paws went ruthlessly trampling upon some of the choicest flowers in the conventional flower-garden.

He was her slave--her own. He loved her with an idolatrous devotion which she could rarely think of without smiling at his exaggerated estimate of her charms and graces. He was hers--so entirely that no possibility of losing him ever entered into her mind. He was hers, and we are apt to be just a little indifferent about the possessions we hold most securely. It had become a matter of course that her husband should scatter all the treasures of his affection at her feet, and hold himself richly repaid by any waif or stray of tenderness she might choose to bestow upon him. She had no uneasiness about him,--none of those sharp twinges of jealousy--those chilling pangs of doubt--those foolish and morbid fears, which are apt to disturb the peace of even the happiest wife. She knew that he had loved her from the very hour of their first meeting, against his will, in despite of his better reason. She knew that he had been content to stand afar and worship her in utter hopelessness; and having now rewarded his fidelity, she fancied that she had no more to do, except to receive his idolatry, and smile upon him now and then when it pleased her to be gracious.

There was neither pride nor presumption in her nature; but she had lived all her life in one narrow circle, and she could not help being unconsciously patronizing in her treatment of the man who had taken her Majesty’s shilling, and blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots.

Francis Tredethlyn might perhaps have been entirely satisfied by brightly patronizing smiles, and gentle pattings on the head, if he had not been blessed with a friend and adviser, always at his elbow, always ready to step in with an intellectual lantern held gracefully aloft, and a mocking finger pointed, when the simple Cornishman’s perception failed to show him the uncomfortable side of the subject.

“What a darling she is!” exclaimed Mr. Tredethlyn, as he left the house with Harcourt Lowther, after Maude had parted from him on the staircase all in a flutter of silk and lace, and with a feathery bush of golden hair framed in the last Parisian absurdity in the way of bonnets.

“Mrs. Tredethlyn is just the sort of wife for a man of the world,” Harcourt answered, with a slight shrug of his well-shaped shoulders. “But I can’t help fancying sometimes that you’re too good a fellow to be thrown away upon the loveliest creature who ever isolated herself from the rest of the human race in the remote centre of a continent of moiré antique. Of course I can’t for a moment deny that you are the most fortunate of created beings--but--there is always a ‘but,’ you know, even if one has a beautiful wife and thirty thousand a year. I suppose it is the habit of my mind to quarrel with perfection. I think if I were a fresh-hearted, simple-minded fellow like you, Tredethlyn, I should yearn for something nearer and dearer to me than a fashionable wife.”

The finger of Mephistopheles, always pointing, generally contrived to touch a sore place. Francis Tredethlyn, even when he had been happiest in the sunlight of Maude’s smiles, had felt a vague sense of that one bitter truth. She was no nearer to him than of old. The impassable gulf still yawned between them, not to be bridged over by pretty little courtesies or patronizing smiles.

But in spite of all inward misgivings, Mr. Tredethlyn turned upon his friend, and hotly denied the truth of that gentleman’s observations.

Harcourt Lowther was quite resigned to a little fiery contradiction of this kind. The arrow went home to the mark it had been shot at, and rankled there. Such discussions were very frequent between the two men; and however firmly Francis might argue with his friend in the daytime, he was apt to lie awake in the dead of the night, like false cousin Amy in the poem, when the rain was pattering on the roofs of the palatial district, and wonder, with a dull, aching pain in his heart, whether Harcourt Lowther was right after all; and Maude--sunny-haired, beautiful, frivolous Maude--would never be any nearer and dearer to him than she was now.

In the meantime, Mr. Lowther, who sowed the seeds of the disease, was always ready with the remedy; and the remedy was--dissipation.

Harcourt Lowther, in whose few years of legal study had been crammed the vicious experiences of a lifetime, was eager to perform the promise he had made to Francis Tredethlyn some two years before, when the young man first received the tidings of his uncle Oliver’s bequest.

“I told you I’d show you life, dear boy,” he said; “and I mean to keep my word. While Mrs. Tredethlyn amuses herself with the usual social treadmill business--perpetually moving on, and never getting any farther--you and I will see a world in which life is worth living.”

Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn was lured away from a home in which he was taught to believe himself unappreciated, and introduced for the first time within the unholy precincts of the kingdom of Bohemia.

He entered the mysterious regions at first very reluctantly. He had the ignorant rustic’s notion of Vice, and fancied that she would show herself in naked hideousness; but he found her with her natural face hidden under a plaster mask modelled from the fair countenance of Virtue. It was something of a caricature, perhaps; for all imitations are so apt to become exaggerations. He found that Bohemia was a kind of Belgravia in electro-plate. There were the same dresses and properties, only a little tarnished and faded; the same effects, always considerably overdone; the same jargon, but louder and coarser. Life in Bohemia seemed like a Transpontine version of a West-end drama, with cheaper scenery and actors, and a more uproarious audience.

This was the kingdom with whose inner mysteries Harcourt Lowther affected a fashionable familiarity. He presented his wealthy friend to the potentates of the kingdom, and carried him hither and thither to worship at numerous temples, whose distinguishing features were the flare of gas-lamps, and the popping of champagne corks, branded with the obscurest names in the catalogue of wine-growers, and paid for at the highest rate known in the London market.

Perhaps in all his wanderings in the darksome wilderness which his Mentor called London life, Francis Tredethlyn’s worst sin was the perpetual “standing” of spurious sparkling wines, and the waste of a good deal of money lost at unlimited loo, or blind hookey, as the case might be. He had high animal spirits and thirty thousand a year, which common report exaggerated into sixty thousand, and which the more imaginative denizens of Bohemia multiplied into fabulous and incalculable riches; so that he met with a very cordial welcome from the magnates of the land. But the descent of Avernus, however easy it may be, is a gradual slope, and not a precipitous mountain-side, down which a man can be flung headlong by one push from a friendly hand. Francis Tredethlyn yawned in the faces of the brightest stars in the Bohemian hemisphere. His frank nature revolted against the shallow falsehoods around and about him. The glare of the gas seemed to have no brilliancy: the bloom upon the women’s faces was only so much vermilion and crimson-lake bought at the perfumer’s shop, and ghastly to look at in a sidelight. The laughter had the false ring of spurious coin; the music was out of tune. In all this little world there was no element of spontaneity; except perhaps in the uproarious gaiety of some boyish country squire making a railroad journey through some fine old property that had been kept sacred and unbroken for half-a-dozen centuries, to be squandered on a handful of pearls to melt in Cleopatra’s wine, or expended on the soaps and perfumeries of a modern Lamia.

There was neither bloom nor freshness on anything except on the wings of a few pigeons newly lured into the haunts of the vulture tribe. Everything else was false, and withered, and faded. The smiles of the women, the friendship of the men, were as spurious as the rhubarb champagnes and gooseberry Moselles, and were bought and sold like them. Mephistopheles may lead his pupil to the Brocken, but he cannot compel the young man to enjoy himself amongst the wicked revellers; nor can he altogether prevent the neophyte from perceiving such small _inconvenances_ as occasional red mice hopping out of the mouths of otherwise charming young damsels.

Harcourt Lowther found it very hard work to keep Francis Tredethlyn amused, night after night, in remote and unapproachable regions, whose very names were only to be spoken in hushed accents over the fourth bottle of Chambertin or Clos Vougeot at a bachelor’s dessert. Poor Frank would rather have been dancing attendance upon his wife, and trampling on the silken trains of stern matrons and dowagers at the dullest “Wednesday,” or “Tuesday,” or “Saturday,” in all the stuccoed mansions in which Maude’s pretty face and pleasant manners, and his own good old Cornish name and comfortable income, had secured his footing. He was very good-natured, and did not care how much bad wine he was called upon to pay for. He could lose a heavy sum at blind hookey without the faintest contraction of his black eyebrows, or the smallest depression of his lower jaw. But he did not enjoy himself.

He did not enjoy himself--and yet somehow or other he went again and again to the same temples, always under convoy of his friend Harcourt, and generally very firmly resolved that each visit should be the last. But there was always some special reason for another visit--an appointment with some elegant acquaintance of the vulture tribe, who wanted his revenge at blind hookey; or a little dinner to be given at the Star and Garter, in honour of some beautiful Free-Lance, whose chief fascinations were the smoking of tissue-paper cigarettes and a vivacious disregard of Lindley Murray. There was always some engagement of this kind; and as it happened somehow that Francis Tredethlyn generally found himself pledged to act as paymaster, it would of course have been very unmanly to draw back. If he could have sent his friend Lowther and a blank cheque as a substitute for his own presence, he would gladly have done so; but his friend Lowther took care to make that impossible. So the matter always ended by Mr. Tredethlyn finding himself, at some time on the wrong side of midnight seated at the head of a glittering dinner-table; with the ruins of an expensive dessert and the faces of his guests only dimly visible athwart a thick and stifling vapour of cigar smoke; while the clamour of strident laughter mingled with the occasional chinking and clattering of glass, as some applauding hand thumped its owner’s approval of the florid sentiments in an eloquent postprandial oration.

It is impossible to be perpetually paying for sparkling wines without occasionally drinking a little too freely of their bubbling vintage. Francis Tredethlyn, under the influence of unlimited Moet or Clicquot, found the Bohemians a much pleasanter kind of people than when he contemplated them in the cold grey morning light of sobriety. Harcourt Lowther took care that his friend should pretty generally look at things through a rose-tinted medium engendered of the juice of the grape; for he found that it was by this means alone that he could retain his hold upon his pupil.

Go where he might, the Cornishman carried his wife’s image in his heart, and he would have left the most brilliant assemblage in Bohemia for a quiet _tête-à-tête_ in Maude’s boudoir; if his friend Harcourt had not carefully impressed upon him that his entrance into that pretty little chamber was an intrusion only tolerated by Mrs. Tredethlyn’s good nature.

There is no need to enter very minutely upon the details of the work which Harcourt Lowther was doing. The art of ruining a well-disposed young man is not a very difficult one; but Mr. Lowther had reduced the art into a science. His great effects were not the sublime hazards of genius, but the calculated results of a carefully studied process. So many nights in a tainted atmosphere; so many Richmond and Greenwich dinners; so many subtle insinuations of Maude’s indifference, must produce such and such an effect. Mr. Lowther displayed none of that impolitic and vulgar haste with which a meaner man might ruin his friend. He never hurried his work by so much as a single step taken before its time. But he never wavered, or relented, or turned aside even for one moment from the course which he had mapped out for himself. So, in the course of that London season, it became quite a common thing for a street hansom to bring Mr. Tredethlyn to the gigantic stuccoed mansion which he called his own in the early sunlight of a spring morning. There were even times when the returning wanderer found it no easy matter to open a door with a patent latch-key, which _would_ go meandering hopelessly over the panel of the door, scratching all manner of eccentric circles and parabolas on the varnish, instead of finding its way into the key-hole. There was one awful night, on which Maude, coming home from some very late assembly, was stumbled against by a tipsy man who was groping his way up the great stone staircase, and found, to her unutterable horror, that the tipsy man--who apologized profusely for tearing half-a-dozen yards of Mechlin from the hem of her skirt, declaring that he was “ver’ sorr’, ’pon m’ wor’; b’t y’ see, m’ dea’ Maurr, if y’ w’ll wear dress s’ long, mussn’ be s’prise get torr t’ piecess”--was her husband.

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