CHAPTER XXXVI

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POOR FRANK’S LETTER.

Maude shut herself in her own rooms after her interview with Francis, and refused to see any one except Julia. She wanted some one to cling to in her sudden distress, and was fain to throw herself upon the Irish girl’s bosom for consolation.

Then Julia Desmond had her revenge. It was very sweet to see the woman who had usurped the cup of prosperity once held to her own lips brought down so low; more wretched in the midst of her wealth and grandeur than Julia had been in her lonely attic at Bayswater, with a July sun glaring in upon her through a curtainless window, and the drowsy voices of her pupils droning in her ears. The pleasure that thrilled through her breast as she held Maude Tredethlyn in her arms, and heard her declare, amidst passionate sobs, that Francis had been false and base and wicked, and that she was the most miserable woman in the world, was a sensation more exquisite than Miss Desmond had ever known before. For the honour of humanity, that wicked pleasure did not last very long. The daughter of Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond was not altogether base. Maude was at her feet, and she was avenged. It was her rival’s insolent happiness--happiness always _does_ seem insolent to the unhappy--that had galled her to the quick. The two women were on a level now, and Julia forgave her old companion.

“I told you he was a villain,” she said; and that was the only unkind speech she uttered. After that, she was comforter, confidante, friend, and she was almost sorry to see the endurance of Maude’s grief. “You have your fine house and your carriages still,” she said, as the young wife sat on the ground at her feet in the abandonment of her sorrow; “you could never have married Francis Tredethlyn for any other reason than the wealth he could give you. What does it matter to you whether he is true or false? You never loved him.”

“No,” answered Maude, naïvely, “I suppose not. But it is so shameful of him to care for anybody else. And from what Harcourt Lowther says, he does care for that horrible person; and to leave me, Julia, day after day, and to be--there--all the time--in a garden--smoking--looking as much at home as if he had lived there all his life--I never can forgive him, Julia!”

“Of course not,” Miss Desmond replied promptly; “but I don’t see that you need make yourself so very unhappy about his conduct. You will have a formal separation, I suppose. Your papa, or your papa’s solicitors, will manage that, no doubt; and you will live quietly in a smaller house than this. You will not be able to go so much into society, you know; for it is so difficult for a woman who is separated from her husband to escape scandal, however careful she may be,” Julia added, with considerable satisfaction. It is so nice to sit in the dust and mingle our sympathetic tears with those of the fallen powers who have lately queened it over us.

Maude’s sobs redoubled.

“Society!” she exclaimed. “I hate society! Yes, it’s no use talking, Julia. I know what you’re going to say about my going out to three

## parties a night, and so on; but I don’t like it--nobody likes it. They

get into the whirlpool, and there they are. If you go to Mrs. A.’s Thursday, you must go to Lady B.’s Friday, or you offend her; and if you go once, you must go on going, or it seems as if you didn’t like the people you met; and then, if you don’t ask people, you are accused of dropping them; and if you ask strange people, you are accused of picking them up; and if you always ask the same people, your parties are called slow; and if you ask different people, you are called capricious. I am so tired of the world, Julia,” sighed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “When I drive any distance to dinner on an autumn evening, I always envy the people who live in little villas, and drink tea at seven o’clock in pretty parlours that I can see in the firelight. They seem _so_ happy. I never hear a muffin-bell--don’t laugh, Julia; but there _is_ something peculiar in a muffin-bell--without thinking how hollow my life is, compared to the lives of the people who eat the muffins. And then I fancy that I should have been so much happier in a pretty little cottage in St. John’s Wood, with a tiny, tiny back-garden sloping down to the canal, and a still tinier garden in front for Floss to bark in. I used to think sometimes,” continued Maude dropping her voice and speaking with some slight embarrassment, “that Francis and I would get to understand each other better by-and-by, and that we should lead quite a Darby-and-Joan sort of life, doing a great deal of good, and going out much less. But, of course, that hope is quite gone now. I can never endure his society again. I could never trust him. And oh, Julia, I did trust him so implicitly! I had such a belief in his goodness that I despised myself for not being better worthy of him. And to think that he should deceive me so cruelly; that he should have been deceiving me all along, leading a wicked life amongst wicked people for his own pleasure; when I fancied that he was driven from his home by my indifference, and reproached myself so bitterly for being wanting in my duty to him.”

In this strain poor Maude discoursed at intervals for some hours. Julia was very patient, sympathetic even, in a hard kind of way; but she bore with all her weight upon the evidence of Francis Tredethlyn’s perfidy, and she drained the cup of her triumph to the very dregs.

It was not till the next morning that the letter which Francis had left in the library was delivered to his wife. She was sitting in her boudoir, with an untasted breakfast before her, and the sympathetic Julia on the other side of the table, when her maid brought the missive, which a housemaid had discovered at daybreak on her master’s table, two or three hours before Mr. Tredethlyn’s valet found the little bedroom behind the library untenanted, and perceived that his master had not slept at home.

The Cornishman’s letter was very simply worded. Maude opened it hastily in the hope that it might contain some justification of her husband’s conduct. But he did not even allude to his delinquencies, and confined himself to bidding an earnest and friendly farewell to the wife who had never loved him. Tears of disappointment, humiliation, regret, poured slowly down Maude’s cheeks as she read the letter. It was the first time Francis had written to her since her marriage; and there was something almost strange to her in the sight of his bold commercial hand, whose accustomed regularity had been a little disturbed by the writer’s agitation.

“MY VERY DEAR WIFE,--I write to you for the first time since it has been my privilege to address you by that sacred name. If I could tell you the pride and happiness I once felt in that privilege, when first you laid your hand in mine, when first I heard you called by my name, I should be a very different person from what I am; and then it is possible this letter need never have been written. I write to bid you good-bye, Maude; and I think the best proof I can give you of my love is the proof I give you now, when I bring my mind to the necessity of our separation, and resign myself to the knowledge that I may never see your face again upon this earth.

“I will not tell you how soon I discovered your indifference--how soon another person demonstrated to me that your feeling towards me was even something worse than indifference; that it was dislike and contempt which I inspired in your mind. My dense ignorance of the world, and your amiable nature, would have prevented my making this discovery of my own accord. But there are always plenty of those ‘good-natured friends’ the man in the play talks about. _I found such a friend._ If you have any curiosity upon the subject, Rosa Grunderson, who is a good honest-hearted little girl, will tell you the name of the man who opened my eyes to the full misery of my position. In writing this, Maude, I have no thought of reproach against _you_. To me you have been and always will be something so bright and lovely as to be amenable to none of the common laws which govern common natures. When you offered to be my wife, you yielded to a generous impulse; and it is I who deserve reproach for having been so base in my blind selfishness as to accept the sacrifice you were willing to offer in repayment of a fancied obligation. I cannot undo the past; but I can at least set you in some manner free from the fetters you forged for yourself under the influence of that brief enthusiasm. So long as I live, one of the miseries of my life will be the knowledge that I shut you out of a brighter fate; that I deprive you of a more worthy companion; that the greatest sacrifice I can make in atonement of the past will only make you the lonely widow of a living husband. But I can at least rid you of the society of a man whose presence inspires you with disgust and loathing. O Maude, I am quoting your own words; spoken so deliberately, so coldly, that I should be indeed mad and cowardly, were I to shrink from accepting them in their fullest import. I might have doubted until to-night; I might have hugged myself with the notion that a liar and a scoundrel, for his own base purposes, had taught me to think myself despised and disliked; but your own lips have spoken, and I can doubt no longer. Oh, my darling, my pet, my beloved, this seems so like a reproach; but it is not, it is _not_.

“I am going to South America. When you read this, my preparations will no doubt have begun. If possible, I shall sail immediately. Of all the men who ever left England for that fiery young world out yonder, there was never, perhaps, any one better adapted to be happy and successful there than I am. I bid good-bye for ever to the idle dissipations, the drunken orgies in which I have sometimes found distraction, but never happiness. And I begin a new life in a new field of labour. My uncle’s money has been the root of all my misery, and I shall take very little of that useless gold to the other shore. I don’t think I was ever guilty of any great folly while I was a poor man; but since I have been a rich one, my life has seemed one long mistake.

“I write so much about myself and my own plans because I do not want the memory of me, or of any sorrow which I may feel in this

## parting, to cloud the brightness of your future; and I

understand your generous nature well enough to know that you will be happier if you can believe that I am happy. O Maude, if you could know how anxious I am that the life before you should be a bright and happy one, you might almost forgive me for the pain my selfish folly has inflicted upon you! My poor, generous-hearted girl! my innocent darling! you thought it was so light a thing to link your life to the life of a man whom you could not love; and you have borne your burden so quietly. I cannot release you from the chain that binds you to me, but I will do my best to make that chain a light one. And, for the rest, I go to a country in which life and death walk hand in hand together. I take with me all an ignorant man’s love of adventure, a soldier’s indifference to danger. Wear your chain patiently, darling,--you may not have to wear it long. But one word of warning from the man who has loved you so foolishly, and, until this night, so selfishly. You have married hastily once. Weigh well what you do if ever you marry again. If you accepted for your husband an ignorant West-country boor when you married me, I was at least an honest man. If I die, Maude, and you are free to make a second marriage, be sure that the husband of your choice has something of your own noble character; as well as some smattering of the accomplishments that please you, and the tricky jargon about art and literature which passes for cleverness. I was anxious once to make myself a gentleman for your sake, Maude; and when we have been visiting together, I have listened to the men’s talk, for I wanted to find out how it was done; and you could never guess how spurious some of that brilliant conversation sounds to a man who _only_ listens. I used to read some of your Mudie books in my own room sometimes of a morning,--Froude, and Carlyle, Burton, Barth, and so on; and I’ve heard men laying down the law about them at night, and I have known from their talk that they hadn’t read a page of the

## book itself, and were only airing the second-hand opinions

picked up out of a review.

“I saw you shudder once, Maude, because I didn’t know it was the right thing to say ‘Barkley Square;’ and pronounced the word as it is spelt. But oh, what bosh I’ve heard the Barkley-Squarers talk sometimes about things I do understand! I’ve heard a man at a dinner-party hold forth about our convict system sometimes, and transportation, and Van Diemen’s Land, till I’ve been inclined to get up and do something to him with a carving-knife; and oh, the self-satisfied manner of the creature, and the way he has lifted his eyebrows and looked at _me_, if I ventured to express any opinion upon the subject! In South America there may be fever and disease, perhaps--privation, danger; but there will be no Barkley Square. I may meet with Aztecs, who may maltreat or even assassinate me; but they won’t have little bits of glass that they can’t see through to hitch into their eyes whenever I speak to them. And they won’t lift their eyebrows and begin to whisper about me the moment I enter a room. And I shall never hear them say, ‘Oh, the _rich_ Tredethlyn, is it? Gad, what a clodhopper!’

“Why do I write about these things, Maude, when I am writing to bid you good-bye for ever? Only because I want you to believe there is _something_ wanting even in the perfect world in which you live. If my death should set you free in your youth, marry again, dear, by all means; but marry a man whose truth and loyalty have been proved by a life of unblemished honour; marry a man who has set his mark upon the age--who has _done something_; for such a man is scarcely likely to be a scoundrel. Above all, darling, accept my warning against _one_ man: _do not marry Harcourt Lowther_.

“All the privileges that you have enjoyed during your bondage you shall retain in your freedom. Before sailing, I shall make my will, in which you will be left residuary legatee, and recipient of the bulk of my fortune. While I live, your income will be large enough to support the style in which you have lived during the past year; and there will be a wide margin left for the indulgence of every impulse of your generous heart. I shall place full directions as to the management of my fortune in the hands of my solicitors, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon; and they will call on you by my direction to explain your position immediately after receiving my instructions. You will find yourself the mistress of the larger part of the income derived from my late uncle’s investments and from the Cornish estate, and you will have no further trouble than to sign your name now and then, when the lawyers want you to do so. In the interim I enclose a cheque for £500, so that you may not be without ready money. Your father’s affairs are now, he tells me, in a very easy state, and I do not leave him in troubled water. He may consider you his creditor for the interest of the thirty thousand sunk in his business; and I don’t suppose he will find you a very importunate one.

“And now good-bye indeed. I leave you with all confidence in your noble heart, your high principles. You are too good and pure to be otherwise than happy. Far away on the Pampas, lying under canvas, with the long silvery trail of the moonlight on the grey expanse beyond my tent, the whisper of faint winds among the long grasses sounding in my ears, I shall think of you, and see you happy in the old English garden at Twickenham, loitering on the terrace by your father’s side. In that trackless loneliness, fever-parched perhaps, and far away from the chance of water, I shall think of the blue English river, but _never_ think of it without seeing your image standing by the tide, your bright face reflected in the glassy stream. Oh, Maude, I have loved you so dearly, so fondly! and now that it comes to saying good-bye, it seems almost as difficult to tear myself from this lifeless sheet of paper, as it would be to take my lips away from yours in a last long kiss. My pet, my darling, God bless you, and good-bye! Think of me sometimes; but never with pain. Some midnight, when you are waltzing in a crowded ball-room, with a brazen band braying in your ears, and the hum of a hundred voices round about you, think that in some savage wilderness a man is kneeling under God’s blue sky, praying for you as few people are prayed for on this earth; think sometimes, if a special peace comes down upon you, like the cool shadow we have watched drop slowly upon the river when the sun was down, think, darling, that I am saying, ‘God keep and guard her safely through the night! God fill her heart with peace and gladness, whether she sleeps or wakes!’

“And so, my own dear wife, for the first and last time in my life, I sign myself your true and loyal husband,

“FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.”

Julia had fluttered out of the room and into the little conservatory, where there were always faded leaves to be snipped off, or bird-cages to be replenished with fresh water. Miss Desmond, in her darkest mood, was too much a lady to sit by and stare while Maude possessed herself of the contents of her husband’s letter. She lingered among the twittering canary-birds and sprawling ferns so long as she considered that delicacy demanded she should be absent, and then she strolled back to the breakfast-table with a look of supreme unconsciousness. But she gave a little scream as she glanced across the table at Mrs. Tredethlyn, and flew to the bell. Maude had finished her letter, which lay in scattered sheets at her feet, and she had fallen back upon the sofa-pillows in a dead faint.

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