CHAPTER XXXIV

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THE LADY AT PETERSHAM.

The letter which Francis Tredethlyn wrote in his study was a long one; a very painful one to write, as it seemed, from the face of the writer, and the weary sigh which every now and then escaped from his lips, as his hurrying pen paused for a moment. It was close upon ten o’clock when he began the letter. The clock chimed the half-hour after eleven while he was sealing it. He addressed the envelope, and then threw himself back in his chair to think. He had so much to think of. Maude’s extraordinary conduct, Rosa Grunderson’s revelation, had overthrown the whole fabric of his life; and he found himself surrounded by ruins whose utter chaos he could not contemplate without bewilderment.

For the last few weeks his thoughts had been almost exclusively devoted to his cousin Susan, and her wrongs. Found at last, after so many failures and disappointments, so much delay, the lonely girl had been welcomed as tenderly as any wanderer who ever returned to the lost friends of his youth. But Susan Lesley had a sad story to tell her cousin. The missing link in the chain that Francis Tredethlyn had put together piece by piece was the letter which had been written from St. Petersburg by the man whom Susan had loved and trusted--the man whose diary had revealed to Francis the utter worthlessness of his character.

Robert Lesley’s letter was only a worthy companion to Robert Lesley’s diary. In it he coldly and deliberately told the girl who loved him, that she was not his wife; that the Marylebone marriage was no marriage; the registrar no recognized official, but a scoundrel hired for a twenty-pound note to play the part of that functionary; that the registrar’s office had been no office, but a lodging-house parlour hired for the occasion, and half-a-dozen doors from the real office. This statement was, of course, accompanied by the usual heartless sophistries which run so glibly from the pen, or fall so smoothly from the lips, of an utterly heartless man. The self-confessed betrayer pleaded the madness of an all-absorbing love; the stern necessities of well-bred poverty; the pressure of family circumstances; the fear of a father’s rage; and then, in conclusion, the writer stated the pitiful stipend which he was prepared to offer to the woman he had abandoned, and the child he had disowned.

Susan showed her cousin this letter, and told him how, after receiving it, her mind had almost given way under the burden of her great agony. Then it was that she had gone to Mrs. Burfield, and had written to her father a long letter, telling him something of her story, but not all; appealing piteously to the only friend to whom she could appeal; for faithful Frank was far away in some unknown country. She told her cousin how she had waited, at first with a faint sickly hope, then with a blank despair, for some answer from the father to whom she had appealed. But none came; and when her little stock of money had sunk to its lowest ebb, she left the dull quiet of Coltonslough to begin a weary, lonely struggle for bread, which had endured, without one ray of sunlight to illumine its blank misery, until the summer Sunday afternoon on which Francis Tredethlyn found her sitting in the nurse’s cottage with her boy in her arms.

It was so sad a story, and so sadly common, that there is little need to dwell upon the unvarnished record of a woman’s battle with poverty in the heart of a great city.

“Perhaps I ought to think myself very happy, Francis,” Susan said when she had told her story; “for I was always able to pay the nurse somehow for her care of my darling; and the deadly fear of not being able to do _that_ was the worst trouble I knew in all that dreary time. I have been face to face with starvation, Frank, very often within the last two years; but it is not so terrible, when one is used to it. The help always came at last, and some friendly hand, so unexpected that it might have dropped down from heaven, has often come between me and despair. I have sometimes thought that bitter struggle for my daily bread was only a blessing in disguise, for it kept me from brooding upon my great sorrow; it sometimes shut from me the thought of Robert’s cruelty and my own disgrace.”

“Disgrace!” cried the Cornishman; “no, Susan, there is no shadow of disgrace upon you except the disgrace of being united to a scoundrel and a liar. The marriage before the registrar was a _bonâ fide_ marriage, as binding as if it had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

And then Francis told Susan of his visit to the registrar’s office. This was the balm which he was able to pour into the deepest wound that ever tortured a woman’s heart. But the identity of the husband who had lied in denouncing himself a liar was entirely unknown to Susan. In all the familiar intercourse of the brief period in which the trusting girl had been a petted and happy wife, Robert Lesley had not let fall one careless word relating in the remotest way to his position in life, his family, or his prospects. When first consulted by Francis upon the contents of the diary, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon had instituted an inquiry as to whether a Mr. Robert Lesley had been inscribed on the books of St. Boniface any time between 1845 and 1852; and the answer had been in the negative. No person of the name had been a member of that college within the last ten years. Francis could only conclude, therefore, that Mrs. Burfield had been right in her supposition that the man calling himself Robert Lesley had shielded his identity under a false name.

“But your husband was visited by his brother, was he not, Susan?” said Mr. Tredethlyn, when this subject was discussed between the cousins.

“Yes; but I knew no more of Robert’s brother than of Robert himself. He did not come to us often. I heard that he was a lawyer,--a barrister, I think,--and that he lived in the Temple. I heard even that by accident, and Robert seemed almost vexed that I should know so much.”

All these trifling circumstances seemed to point inevitably to one conclusion; Robert Lesley had intended from the first to abandon his wife, whenever his own interests rendered it advisable that he should throw off the tie that bound him to her. Love and selfishness go very badly hand-in-hand together; and love had soon left selfishness sole master of the field.

“But this man shall be made to acknowledge his wife,--to give a name to his child,” cried Francis, “if he can be found.”

If he could be found: that was the grand question. But Mr. Tredethlyn was quite at a loss with regard to the means by which his cousin’s husband was to be found. In this case even the grand medium by which the lost are restored to the arms of their friends--the second column of the “Times”--could be of no avail; for what is the use of advertising for a man who does not want to reveal himself?

“If my husband is alive, Providence may throw him across my path some day,” Susan said, resignedly. “He could not be more dead to me than he is now if he were buried in the deepest grave that ever held the ashes of the lost; but if he gave my boy the name that is his right, I think I could forgive him all the wrong he has done me.”

It was quite in vain that Francis Tredethlyn sought to carry his cousin and her son home to his own house. The sorrowful young mother shrank with absolute terror from the idea of encountering strangers, of finding herself in a splendid house amongst happy people.

“I am used to my poverty, Francis,” she said;--“let me be poor still. Nobody is inquisitive about me, because I am beneath people’s curiosity. No one questions me about the husband who has deserted me, or extorts my story from me only to doubt it when it is told. My father would not believe me; can I expect strangers to be more trusting than he was? No, Francis; leave me alone in my obscurity. I have a lodging near here, and I can see my darling every day. I will freely accept from you a little income which will enable me to live as I have lived, without working as hard as I have worked; but I will accept no more. I am delighted to think that my father left his fortune to you, Frank; and I thank and bless you for having taken so much trouble to find me out.”

Francis Tredethlyn found it hard work to win Susan away from this determination, so quietly expressed. But he did at last persuade her to agree to his own plans for her life, on condition that he should tell Maude nothing, nor ask Susan to meet her until the missing husband was found, and compelled to acknowledge his wife and son. Francis consented to promise this; but he cherished a hope that Susan would relent by-and-by, when she heard more of Maude’s tender and amiable nature, and that he would be able to win his wife’s friendship for the simple country girl who had played with him amongst the daisies in Landresdale churchyard.

“You must accept the home I shall prepare for you, Susy,” said Francis, “or I will have a deed of gift drawn up to-morrow, transferring half my fortune to you. I am ready to divide your father’s wealth with you as soon as ever I understand your legal position. In the meantime let me have the sweetest pleasure my money has ever given me yet--the pleasure of making a happy home for you and my little kinsman. If you knew how I have wasted that hoarded money, Susy, on racecourses, and all kinds of worthless places,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, with a remorseful recollection of one particular brand of Moselle, for which he had been wont to pay fourteen shillings a bottle in the purlieus of the Haymarket.

Susan consented to let her cousin do what he liked with regard to the place in which she was to live henceforward. What mother could refuse a bright home for the child she loves? A few words from Francis conjured up the vision of a garden, where the boy could play under the shadow of lilacs and laburnums; where the summer breeze would waft the petals of overblown roses around that golden head. From the happy moment in which he urged the child’s welfare as an argument against the mother, Francis Tredethlyn’s triumph was secured. Susan pondered. She thought of the sweet country air, the bright rooms, with the fresh breath of morning blowing in at the open windows, the garden, the cow, the chickens, and all the joys of that sweet rustic paradise which town-bred children hear of from their mother’s lips, and see only in their dreams. Susan hesitated. Francis had made friends with the boy by this time, and had enlisted the child on his side of the argument. When the woman’s sorrowful pride began to hold out weakly, when the mother’s heart showed symptoms of relenting, the child’s little chubby arms crept round her neck, and the child’s tiny voice pleaded in her ear:

“Peese, mammy, do live in the pooty house, and let Wobert have pooty flowers.”

It was the triumph of infantine oratory. Susan turned to her kinsman, half laughing, half crying, and gave him her hand.

“You must do as you like, cousin Frank,” she said. “Whatever is best for Robert must be best for me.”

Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn had withdrawn himself in a great measure from the society of Mr. Lowther, while he scoured the prettiest suburbs in search of a home for his cousin, and superintended the necessary improvements and decoration, the selection of the simple furniture, the arrangement of a garden, in which Robert Lesley’s son might play happily, his life undarkened by the baseness of an unknown father. There had been unspeakable pleasure for the Cornishman in the doing of this work. It was so long since he had been of use to any one; it was so long since his supremest benevolence to his fellow-men had taken any higher form than the payment of a dinner-bill, and a handsome bonus to the waiter. He seemed to breathe a new atmosphere, a fresher, purer air, when he shook himself clear of Harcourt Lowther’s society, and spent a summer’s day pottering amongst carpenters and house-painters in the Petersham cottage. The odour of turpentine and lead did not give him a headache; it was almost invigorating after the stifling fumes of musk and mock-turtle, patchouli, and devilled whitebait that had pervaded the hotel dining-rooms in which he had so often acted as host. Energetic though Mr. Tredethlyn was in the carrying out of his arrangements, Susan had been established little more than a week at the cottage, and the paint on the Venetian shutters was still rather sticky, when Harcourt Lowther found the upholsterer’s bill, which gave him the clue to his pupil’s mysterious conduct. To hasten down to Petersham, find the cottage, refresh himself with dry sherry and soda-water at the nearest tavern, and to make himself agreeably familiar with the landlord of the tavern, was all incomparably easy to Mr. Lowther. From the landlord he heard all about Brook Cottage. How it had been to let for nearly a twelvemonth; how it had been taken all in a hurry at the end of May by a dashing-looking gentleman from town, who had been reported scouring the neighbourhood in hansom cabs, inquiring for houses to let, for three days at a stretch; how painters and glaziers, carpenters and gardeners, had set to work in hot haste to renew and revivify everything in-doors and out; how waggon-loads of the finest gravel from Wimbledon, and cartloads of the softest turf from Ham, had been laid down in the garden; how furniture, that was every bit of it new, had been brought down from London; how the tall, dashing, energetic gentleman in the hansom cab had been perpetually on the ground with his officious finger for ever in the pie; and how larger cans of half-and-half had been consumed by the workmen at the cost of the dashing gentleman than the landlord of the Prince’s Feathers remembers to have chalked up against any one customer since he had traded as a licensed victualler.

All this Mr. Lowther was told; and beyond this, he heard how a lady, very pretty and quite young, but a little pale and worn-looking, had arrived at last to take possession of “the prettiest little box that was ever put together, without regard to expense;” how she was attended by an elderly female in black, who had evidently seen better days, and who acted as nurse to a little boy; how two respectable young women had been hired in the neighbourhood, to act as cook and housemaid; and how, coming regularly to the Feathers in quest of the kitchen-beer, they had already reported their mistress as the sweetest and pleasantest of ladies, and first-cousin to the dashing gentleman in the hansom cab. The landlord tried to look as if he had no uncharitable thoughts about this cousinship; but Harcourt Lowther saw that Francis Tredethlyn and the lady had been subjects of grave scandal in that quiet country place. He heard that the dashing gentleman had been at Petersham almost every day for the last week; and that he and the lady passed the greater part of their time in the garden, where they might be seen at any time from the high-road,--the gentleman smoking and playing with a little boy, and the lady working, at a rustic table, under a mulberry-tree. A pot-boy, coming in from his rounds, as Harcourt lounged at the bar, confirmed the landlord’s statement when appealed to. He had passed Brook Cottage not five minutes before, and had seen the lady and gentleman talking to a gardener, who was doing something to a rose-tree.

“She’s a rare one for flowers, the lady is,” the potman said, in conclusion.

A rare one for flowers: Harcourt Lowther mused gravely upon this remark.

The fair denizens of Bohemia, to whom he had introduced Francis, were not generally devoted to floriculture in cottage-gardens, though they were greedy of gigantic bouquets, to rest on the velvet cushions of their opera-boxes, or the front seats of their carriages, when they drove to race meetings. Who was this pale, worn-looking young woman, who called Francis cousin? Was she really his cousin, that Cornish girl of whom the soldier had told his master in Van Diemen’s Land, and whose miserably-executed likeness had reminded Harcourt of another face, whose owner had played some part in the experience of his life? Was this inhabitant of the newly-furnished cottage really the Cornish cousin? Mr. Lowther could scarcely imagine that it was so; for, in that case, why should Francis have kept her existence a secret from his _fidus Achates_ in the person of Harcourt himself?

“Secrecy is only another name for guilt,” thought Mr. Lowther. “Our friend has gone to the bad in real earnest this time, and I can make a _coup_. I was getting very tired of the slow game.”

Armed with this information, the schemer went back to town, to take his place in Maude’s opera-box, and to lead up to that idea of a morning at the Cedars, which seemed to originate in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s own brain. Chance, which had been against him so long, had gone with him unfailingly in this business. The lucky moment had come; he had got his lead at last, and had only to play his winning cards. Chance had been constant to the schemer even in that interview between Francis and Rosa; for it had happened that, in all Miss Grunderson’s candid outpourings, she had not dropped a word about Mrs. Tredethlyn’s stroll in the Petersham meadows; though, even if she had done so, the Cornishman might have been very slow to perceive that an accidental glimpse of himself and gentle Susy, in friendly companionship, could have been the primary cause of that stormy greeting which he had received at the hands of his wife. Francis accepted his wife’s passionate outburst as only the climax of the disgust and weariness with which he had inspired her.

“She reproaches me for the life I have been leading lately,” he said bitterly; “but she does not understand her own feelings. It is not my life, but me she hates. It is myself that inspires the loathing and contempt which she talked of, and not my late hours or my gambling and horse-racing.”

After sitting for some time plunged in a gloomy reverie, in the dreary library, where the backs of the books he never opened seemed to frown upon him in their sombre Russia leather brownness, Francis stirred as the little black marble clock on the mantel-piece chimed the quarter after twelve, and felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a note which he had found waiting for him on his table the previous night. It was a tiny twisted _poulet_ from Harcourt Lowther:--

“DEAR FRANK,--A line to remind you of to-morrow night. You will be expected any time after nine.--Yours always,

“H. L.”

This reminder referred to a bachelor’s supper which Mr. Lowther had arranged at his lodgings; a party at which there was to be what the host called a quiet rubber. A rubber played with that deadly quiet which attends the science of whist when heavy amounts tremble in the balance, and a sum that a poor man would call a fortune may depend on the player’s judicious choice between a five and a seven. Such a rubber as that which the well-known Sir Robert was once concluding, when, just as he pondered over his two last cards, a thoughtless looker-on happened to break the solemn silence by one luckless word, and lo, the chain of scientific reasoning dropped to pieces,--the popular statesman played the wrong card, and lost a thousand pounds. It was not often that Harcourt Lowther entertained his friends; but when Francis lapsed into a temporary stagnation, the master was apt to keep his pupil going on the road to ruin by such an entertainment as this. The quiet rubber at Mr. Lowther’s lodgings generally led to other rubbers elsewhere, or cursory appointments for Liverpool or Newmarket, or Chester or Northampton, or a dinner at Richmond, gaily cut for at blind hookey while the men were rising from the whist-table. It was a quarter-past twelve now. It would be nearly one o’clock before the fastest hansom could carry Mr. Tredethlyn to the Strand. Francis looked from the clock on the chimney-piece to the scrap of paper in his hand; hesitated for a few moments, with a black frown upon his face, and then started hastily from his lounging attitude, and looked about him for his hat.

“There couldn’t be a better opportunity,” he muttered, “for saying what I want to say to him.”

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