CHAPTER XXXI
.
THE DIPLOMATIST’S POLICY.
That ponderous Mr. Grunderson, who plunged heavily down upon Maude’s central ottoman, a miraculous combination of upholstery and floriculture--that shining bald-headed Mr. Grunderson, who sat placidly grinning at the company, and addressed his hostess as “Mum”--had begun life as a market-gardener; and, had Mrs. Tredethlyn been born some twenty years earlier, would have been proud to supply her with azaleas and camellias for the decoration of the ottoman upon which he was now sitting. The march of progress, and the accompanying march of bricks and mortar, had driven before them the cabbages and strawberry-beds, the cucumber-frames and young plantations of evergreens, by the cultivation of which Mr. Grunderson and his forefathers had lived comfortably upon one-o’clock dinners of fat bacon and indigestible dumplings, with occasional varieties of butcher’s meat, thinking themselves passing rich when their ledgers showed a profit of two or three hundred pounds at the end of the year.
The march of civilization, or rather the march of the myrmidons of that unreasoning despot, that implacable ruler, whom women call Fashion, always pushing westward, had contrived to push Mr. Grunderson’s gardens off the face of the earth, and in so doing had set a Pactolus flowing steadily into Mr. Grunderson’s pocket. The wealth poured in upon him with a rapidity which was like nothing but a fairy tale. That heroic Jack of the nursery story--who, by the bye, seems to have had no surname--never looked in more amazement on the bean-stalk that shot into the very skies in a single night, than did the honest market-gardener at the stuccoed district which had arisen, seven or eight stories and a campanello tower high, on the fields where he remembered execrating the slugs on dewy mornings a few years before. Where a prairie of bright red stocks had perfumed all the summer air with spicy odours, a square of stately mansions stared grimly at each other, and prime ministers’ carriages rolled with meteor lamps through the midnight darkness. Where ragged children, and gaunt sunburnt women, in blucher-boots and with indescribable bonnets balanced on their freckled noses, had weeded strawberry-beds for a pitiful sixpence a day, duchesses trailed their silken trains and wearied of the rolling hours after the approved manner of their kind in the pages of the poets and romancers. The transformation was as perfect as it had been rapid; and instead of the cabbages and cabbage-roses, the cucumber-frames and hothouse flowers of his youth and early manhood, Mr. Grunderson found himself, at fifty years of age, proprietor of ground-rents that made him a millionaire. He had only one child, a daughter, who had been educated for some fifty pounds a year at a seminary for young ladies, in which she had been cruelly snubbed on account of her father’s cabbages, and who was now determined to revenge herself on the companions of her blighted youth by the splendour of her womanhood. Led by this young lady, who was blessed with an energetic temperament and imperturbable good humour, Mr. Grunderson found himself, always more or less independently of his own agency, going through the complete formula of fashionable life according to his daughter Rosa’s notion of that formula; which notion was extremely variable, and took its colour from the last acquaintance to whom the lively heiress was pleased to attach herself.
The very last just now happened to be Maude Tredethlyn, about whom Rosa was ready to go off into raptures at any moment, and whom she always spoke of as “a dear,” “a love,” or “a darling.” But there was a warm womanly heart beating under Rosa’s fine dresses, and her raptures had more meaning in them than the raptures of enthusiastic young ladies are apt to have. She attached herself so effectually to Maude that Mrs. Tredethlyn was fain to forget, or at any rate to forgive, the occasional lapses in her grammar, the unpleasant warmth of her fat little hands, which always came flopping down on the hands of her companion when she was enthusiastic, and the shadow of vulgarity which is so apt to accompany the sunshine of low-born liveliness.
Harcourt Lowther took an early opportunity to inform his elder brother that the young lady in pink areophane was an heiress, and an heiress well worthy the cultivation of any enterprising young diplomatist. Roderick was not slow to take the hint, but he was a great deal too much of a diplomatist to attempt any obvious angling for this rich prize. He exerted all his powers of fascination in order to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Tredethlyn, and he did not address so much as one syllable of the most commonplace civility to the market-gardener’s daughter; the consequence of which little manœuvre was, that as Rosa was sitting next to Maude all the evening, she listened open-mouthed to every word he uttered, and when she departed in her papa’s three-hundred-guinea chariot--the market-gardener had insisted on possessing the traditional lemon-coloured chariot with hammer-cloth, and powdered retainers, which he had beheld and admired in his boyhood--she carried Roderick Lowther’s image away with her.
It must be acknowledged, however, that it was no uncommon occurrence for Miss Grunderson to carry the image of some tolerably good-looking and passably well-mannered young man away from any festal gathering at which she happened to find herself. The good-humoured Rosa had a habit of falling desperately in love with any eligible person whom she encountered either in public or private life, who did anything to make himself notorious, or wore his hair long enough to be entitled a Being. A long list of Beings had occupied that sentimental caravansary which Miss Grunderson called her heart. She had been in love with all the poets, from the Laureate to Mr. Tupper; with all the novelists, from the great Sir Edward to the newest fledged of Mr. Mudie’s popularities; and I fear she often fell in love with angels unawares in the shape of feminine romancers who were pleased to hide their gentle sex under masculine nomenclature. She had been in love--fathoms deep--with Lord Palmerston, Signor Mario, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. Charles Mathews. She was wont to keep the three-hundred-guinea chariot waiting in Pall Mall for an hour at a stretch while she hunted Mr. Graves and his assistants for the last new portrait of her last new idol; and her room was like a good Catholic’s chapel,--hung with the engraved effigies of an army of saints.
It was a very pure flame which burnt before so many shrines, and a very harmless one; and perhaps if Mr. Lowther the elder had known Rosa Grunderson’s little idiosyncrasies, he would not have felt quite so complacently triumphant in the consciousness that her round grey eyes had been fixed upon him all the evening with the fond gaze of hero-worship. Harcourt contrived to swell this triumph by artful little brotherly compliments, as the two young men walked Londonwards under the starlit summer sky, smoking their regalias, and talking as men about town do talk under those sublime stars. Sentimental Rosa was gazing at those luminous unknown worlds from the covert of the pinkest curtains in Stuccoville, and thinking about _Him_! Rosa’s last adoration was always mysteriously alluded to under cover of a personal pronoun. Her admiration for Roderick Lowther was multiplied a hundredfold by the young diplomatist’s disregard of her. Poor Rosa had been accustomed to be made the object of what, in the argotic parlance of her age, she called “a dead set,” on account of her papa’s ground-rents; and she was inclined to imagine Mr. Lowther the noblest and most disinterested of mankind because he did not commence this “dead set” immediately after being introduced to her.
“I wonder whether he knows that I’m _the_ Miss Grunderson?” she thought, as she looked up at those romantic stars so familiar to her in her Byron. “Of course he does, though, ’Pa is _so_ different from the rest of society, that people always know there’s some reason for his being where he is, and they’re not very long guessing that the reason is money. Will anybody ever want to marry me for my own sake, I wonder? Ah, how I wish the Marquis of Westminster would fall in love with me! _He_ couldn’t want pa’s ground-rents.”
Thus the maiden mused in her bower, while Roderick Lowther, encouraged by his junior, talked complacently of his conquest.
“She’s the simplest little thing in Christendom,” he said; “simpler than--anybody I ever met in my life. The disinterested game is the dodge in that quarter, dear boy. Do you remember how Frederic Soulié’s _Lion_ treats the little shopkeeper’s daughter? First with the elegant devotion of a fashionable Romeo, then with the _brusquerie_ of a Benedick or a Petruchio. _Lise Laloine_ died under the treatment; but I don’t think the plump Rosa is made of quite such ethereal stuff. _La Petite_ is sentimental, and wants to be loved for herself alone; ‘O, wert thou in the cauld blast!’ ‘And long he mourned, the Lord of Burleigh;’ and that sort of thing. She shall have it, the darling innocent! Tennyson and Owen Meredith by the _kilo_, disinterested devotion by the bushel. But oh, my Harcourt, do not lure your loving brother into the quagmire of delusive wealth! Make sure that our simple-looking Grunderson does not hide the cloven hoof of insolvency under the golden fleece in which he drapes himself: those simple-looking men generally fail for half a million. I like your Mrs. Tredethlyn, by the bye; she is very pretty and very elegant; but, to be candid, my dear Harcourt--a brother ought to be candid, you know, even at the risk of being unpleasant--I fancy there is more in the husband than you imagine. A man with such a chest must have some solidity in his composition. If I am anything of a physiologist, it is not in that man’s organization to be made a fool of. Ah, I see you don’t care to talk about it; you like to keep your own secrets, and play your own game without backers or advisers. So be it. For myself, I am of an open disposition; I like to talk of my own affairs when they go smoothly, and to drop them when they take the crooked course. I don’t suppose Napoleon the First was very fond of talking about Waterloo. He forgot _that_ little skirmish, you may depend; and talked of Arcola and Lodi, the Pyramids, Austerlitz, Wagram, and Auerstadt. I dare say Mr. Merry holds his tongue about those two-thousand-guinea colts that _didn’t_ win the Derby. People are _not_ eloquent about their failures. I shall look up my old aunt early to-morrow morning; and after that, if you have any excuse for calling on Mrs. Tredethlyn, I shall be glad to accompany you. Unless I am very much at fault in feminine psychology, Miss Grunderson will drop in upon her friend, to discuss my bearish behaviour, on the earliest opportunity. Nothing impresses a sentimental young person so favourably as downright rudeness. The heroine in a lady’s novel always adores the man who snubs her.”
Thus argued the diplomatist by profession, strolling Strand-wards in the starlight; while the diplomatist by organization listened quietly, and thought his own thoughts as regarded this grand conquest, of which his kinsman was so proud. Harcourt Lowther was not apt to resent the insolent _insouciance_, the calm assurance of superiority, with which his senior treated him, and indeed had treated him from that early boyhood in which the lads had played together at Eton. But the wrongs that rankle deeply in a man’s breast are sometimes those which he endures silently. Harcourt believed that his own prospects had been sacrificed to the advancement of Roderick; and he was not sorry when the elder son went wild, and turned his back as coolly upon his father as if he had never been the pampered favourite of weak love, the all-absorbing drain upon a limited income. In every way Roderick had fared better than his brother. Lowther Hall, surrounded by park and farm-lands that constituted an estate of some three hundred acres, might not be worth very much to a man of large ideas and lofty inspirations; but whatever it was worth, it was tightly entailed upon the heir of the Lowthers, and not so much as a game-keeper’s cottage or a scrap of meadow-land was reserved for the luckless junior. Mrs. Lowther had been mistress of a small fortune, but that had been spent on the education of the two young men,--Harcourt in this matter, as in all others, going to the wall; for his University career had been cut short in order that his brother’s debts might be paid, and that extravagant gentleman be enabled to face the big-wigs of his college without fear of clamorous creditors, and read at leisure for a degree which he was too lazy to succeed in getting. After this Harcourt’s prospects had again been sacrificed, and the young barrister, unable to live at the bar, had been fain to accept an ensign’s commission; while Roderick, pushed into the diplomatic world by a desperate effort of family interest, exhibited his handsome face at the Prussian Court, and squandered every farthing that he could screw out of his father’s slender purse. When the purse had become as empty as it well could, there had been the usual remonstrances, the usual bad feeling which is likely to arise between an utterly selfish and unprincipled young man and the father who is no longer able to be of any use to him, and who takes the liberty of resenting the extravagance which has involved his later life in difficulties.
Besides the advantages obtained from his father’s partiality, Roderick Lowther had been the favourite of a maiden aunt of miserly habits and independent fortune, who had condescended to give him her name at the baptismal font, and who had never bestowed on him anything else--except, indeed, a neat cloth-bound copy of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” presented to the lad one birthday, and promptly disposed of at a rag-and-bone shop in the High Street of Harrow for the small sum of fourpence. But although Miss Dorothea Burnett had not been very liberal in her donations to her favourite nephew during her lifetime, it was supposed that, after her departure from this world, the young man would reap the reward of occasional dutifully-worded letters and affected deference to her wishes, and that the reward would be a very substantial one; for Miss Burnett had contrived to swell her own little fortune by many stray windfalls in the way of legacies from relatives, whose regard her busy married sister Mrs. Lowther had neglected to cultivate. Beyond this, the maiden lady had bought small but profitable tenements, and had dabbled a little in shares; and she had watched her small investments with an intelligence, and nursed them with a tenderness, which her stockbroker had admiringly declared to be a credit to the sex she adorned by her commercial acumen.
So Roderick Lowther, finding his younger brother on the field, was alarmed by the idea that he might have been undermined in this direction, and was by no means inclined to lose any time before presenting himself to his spinster aunt. He brushed and curled his amber whiskers with more than usual circumspection, therefore, on the morning after the dinner at Mrs. Tredethlyn’s; and walking through Covent Garden, on his way to Miss Burnett’s Bloomsbury hermitage, he expended sixpence on a hothouse flower to put in the button-hole of the dark-blue coat which he wore under a flimsy outer garment of pale grey. He had dressed himself very carefully, for he knew that, in spite of the maiden lady’s lectures on the subject of prudence, her feminine eye was fascinated by the elegant frivolities which she affected to disapprove.
Miss Burnett occupied a very big house in the dullest street in Bloomsbury--a dismal _cul de sac_, in which there was almost always an elderly organ-grinder playing “Home, sweet home,” or the “Old Hundredth,” with a little group of squalid children gathered round him. The big house smelt like a tomb, and was almost as rarely opened as if it had been one; for the butcher-boy who brought Miss Burnett’s mutton-chop, or the half-pound of steak or three-quarters of liver, upon which Miss Burnett’s servant was wont to make her repast, handed his wares across the area-gate, and exchanged no word of comment with the grim damsel who received them, knowing very well that the lady of the house sat at her favourite window in the front parlour, with her open Bible before her, and a watchful eye upon the outer world, which some sentimental Christians might have thought scarcely consistent with so much piety.
The grim damsel who admitted Roderick Lowther to Miss Burnett’s darksome abode relaxed her ordinary sternness of visage into something faintly resembling a smile as she recognized her mistress’s nephew.
“Your aunt has been very ill since you were last here, Mr. Lowther,” the woman said, in answer to Roderick’s inquiry. “She was very bad with her asthma all the winter; but the warm spring weather brought her round again.”
“Yes,” thought the young man, “the spring weather always does bring her round,--and always will, I suppose, till I am dead and in my grave.”
He was ushered into the dining-room while this irreverent idea was in his mind; and the next minute he was seated opposite to his aunt, inquiring tenderly about her asthma. The dining-room was very dismal. There was more mahogany furniture and brown damask than is compatible with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, and the walls were rendered ghastly by some hideous preparations painted in asphaltum, and exhibiting gigantic cracks that looked like gory, yawning wounds,--preparations which, on account of their smoky nature and revolting choice of subject, were supposed to be the work of the old masters.
“I am very glad to see you, my dear Roderick,” said Miss Burnett, gravely; “as glad as I can be about anything in this carnal life,” added the old lady, whose spirits had been revived that morning by a rise of one and a quarter per cent. in the value of her pet investment. “But we are taught not to rejoice, Roderick, except in that which----Is that a hothouse flower, my dear?” inquired Miss Burnett, looking sharply at the myosotis in her nephew’s button-hole. “Dear, dear! what an extravagant age it is! You are looking very well, my dear Roderick. I dare say you are what a worldly-minded person would call very handsome; but we must try to remember that we are all worms,” murmured the old lady with a doleful sigh; for she took the gloomy view of things which is so common to some people who read that Gospel which is all life and colour and brightness, full of the happy faces of merry-makers at a bridal festival, and little children gathering round a favourite Teacher’s knees, radiant with sudden rejoicings in mourning households, the dead restored to smile upon the living. There is something strange in the dull grey tint which some worshippers are able to infuse into a story that a painter can hardly read without feeling the tropical heat of a meridian sun, the perfume of a thousand lilies, the spicy odours of the feathery palms, and the free dash of Galilee’s blue waves about the prow of a fisherman’s frail bark sailing gaily under an Eastern sky. Surely the richness of colour with which the Catholic Church invests the Christian faith is, after all, only the natural attribute of a religion which arose amid the splendour and beauty of the Holy Land!
“I hope, my dear Roderick,” said the maiden lady, very solemnly, “that while absent in those idolatrous foreign lands, you kept the promise which you gave me before leaving England.”
“My dear aunt,” murmured the young man, who had quite forgotten having made any promise whatever to his pious relative, and was painfully mystified by this address, “I assure you that I----”
He would have broken down here, but the lady came to his rescue.
“Don’t prevaricate, Roderick!” she exclaimed, sternly. “Did you, or did you not, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship during your sojourn among the high priests of Baal? Did you, or did you not, sit under one of those idolatrous worshippers of stocks and stones? And oh, that I should live to see candlesticks on the altar of a church in this very neighbourhood!” cried Miss Burnett, with a sudden burst of indignation; “and to hear snuffling, which I at first attributed to a cold in the head, but afterwards ascertained to be the wicked workings of ROME!”
The stanch Dorothea paused for a few moments to recover her indignation, and then tackled her nephew once more.
“You promised me, before going to Belgium, that you would not, however tempted, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship,” she said.
“And I did _not_, my dear aunt,” answered Roderick, promptly; “I give you my word of honour as a gentleman.” “Nor any other place of worship,” thought the heir, as his aunt nodded approvingly.
And then there was a little more talk, chiefly taking the form of a catechism, which Mr. Lowther went through triumphantly, since his answers to the old lady’s inquiries were shaped in accordance with his knowledge of what was likely to please his aunt, rather than with any reference to actual fact. But a man must do a good many mean things when he devotes himself to the cultivation of a narrow-minded maiden aunt, for the chance of inheriting small tenements and first-preference bonds in flourishing railway companies. Roderick Lowther breathed a long sigh of relief when he left the house that smelt like a tomb behind him, after drinking a glass of his aunt’s dry sherry, which act of devotion was in itself no small penance.
He hailed a hansom as soon as he was safely beyond ken of the observant spinster, and was rattled back to his brother’s lodgings, where he found Harcourt pondering moodily over the “Times” newspaper, and whence the same hansom drove the two Antipholi to Stuccoville.
Mr. Tredethlyn was out, but Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home. Harcourt went into his friend’s study to write a note; while Roderick followed a servant to the drawing-rooms, in the smallest and cosiest of which three gorgeous apartments the diplomatist found Maude and Rosa seated side by side on a low sofa, while proud Julia meditated apart at the window.
“You’re the lady I should like to marry,” thought Roderick, as he looked at Julia’s dark face, which lighted up for a moment with her flashing smile, as she bowed to him, and then relapsed into gloom; “there’d be some pleasure in taming _you_. Who would care to cage a robin? but there would be some glory in subduing the spirit of an eagle.”
Thus mused Mr. Lowther, while he murmured some commonplace remark upon the beauty of the summer day, and dropped himself lazily into a seat near Maude Tredethlyn. He was true to his tactics of the night before, and addressed his remarks almost entirely to Maude and Julia. When he did condescend to address the vivacious Rosa, he did so in a manner that was a delicate admixture of the intellectual bearishness of one of poor Miss Brontés heroes with the lively banter of a Benedick. The result of this policy was triumphant, and the market-gardener’s daughter plunged deeper and deeper still into her five-and-twentieth hopeless attachment.
While Mr. Lowther the elder was cultivating his own interests in the drawing-room, Mr. Lowther the younger was pacing up and down Francis Tredethlyn’s study in no happy frame of mind. Imagine the feelings of a Mephistopheles who begins to suspect that his victim has slipped away from him. Harcourt was beginning to feel very doubtful as to the firmness of his hold on his pupil and companion.
Francis Tredethlyn’s conduct for the last few weeks had quite baffled his friend’s penetration. The Cornishman had grown suddenly preoccupied and reserved. He might still be seen in the haunts of the Bohemians--for Mr. Lowther took care that he should not easily extricate himself from the bonds that he had allowed to be coiled about him; but Francis, always unwilling to be led into the scenes where he had no pleasure, was now more unwilling than ever, and Harcourt found it very difficult to play the game he wanted to play without showing his cards. If it had been a mere question of plucking so many feathers from an innocent pigeon, the thing might have been done easily enough, perhaps; but Mr. Lowther evidently wanted something more than his friend’s golden plumage. It seemed, indeed, as if he would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter ruin and degradation of Maude Tredethlyn’s husband.
To-day, walking up and down the study, whose broad plate-glass window commanded an agreeable view of a stony quadrangle and the roofs and chimneys of a mews, Harcourt thought very despondently of that grand scheme to which he had devoted himself so patiently since his return to England.
“What secret is the fellow hiding from me?” he thought, resentfully; “he refused to dine with me to-day, and he threw over the party I made for Greenwich the day before yesterday. He has made no book for the York summer, and yet he is less at home than ever. What does it all mean? Can he have gone to the bad in real earnest at last, and without any help from me? There must be something in it; but what is the something?”
Tired at last of such meditations as these, Harcourt Lowther flung himself into a chair to compose the letter he had talked about writing when he entered the study.
He wrote his note, which was very brief, and the gist of which was to remind Francis of some engagement that would entail the usual champagne drinking, the usual squandering of money for the gratification of the worthless society in which a few innocent pigeons abandoned themselves to be plucked without mercy by every species of predatory fowl. After having written this little note, so carefully worded that no print of the fiend’s hoof could have been deciphered therein by uninitiated eyes, Harcourt Lowther sat with his elbow on the table, biting the feather of his pen, and ruminating moodily. There were open letters and tradesmen’s bills lying about upon Francis Tredethlyn’s disorderly writing-table. Mr. Lowther flung aside his pen presently, and amused himself by a careless examination of these documents. Some of the bills were heavy ones, but not so heavy as to make any very serious inroad upon the Cornishman’s fortune, and Harcourt tossed them away from him one after the other, uninterested in their details, unconcerned by their sum-totals, until he came to a dead stop all at once at the first line of a document which seemed to him to bear an extraordinary significance.
This document was the bill of a fashionable upholsterer, and the line below the tradesman’s name and address ran thus:
“For goods supplied to Francis Tredethlyn, Esq., at Brook Cottage, Petersham, June 20th, 185-;” and then followed a list of the furniture for a cottage, the sum-total of which came to little more than three hundred pounds.
“So,” muttered Mr. Lowther, “I think I have fallen upon the clue to the mystery. We will go and look at Mr. Tredethlyn’s furnished cottage.”
He wrote the address on a tablet in his _portemonnaie_, and went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he found Roderick intolerably at his ease in the society of the three ladies. There was an arrangement made for a meeting in Maude’s roomy box at Covent Garden, to which Mrs. Tredethlyn was fain to invite the affectionate Rosa, who clung to her with peculiar fondness to-day: and then the two gentlemen took their departure; Roderick to look in at the “Travellers’” and the “St. James’s;” Harcourt to hurry post-haste--or rather hansom-cab haste--to the Waterloo terminus, whence he took the train for Richmond.
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