CHAPTER XXXVII

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ELEANOR DROPS IN UPON ROSAMOND.

It is strange what virtues we are apt to discover in the thing we have lost. After recovering from her fainting-fit, Maude Tredethlyn wept as bitterly for the loss of her husband as if he had been the first choice of her maiden heart. A young lady told Mr. de Quincey that, being on the point of drowning, she saw in one instant her whole life exhibited before her in its minutest details, like a vast picture;--and so the young wife, reading her husband’s solemn farewell, beheld in a moment the picture of her courtship and married life, and saw how good he had been to her. Yes, in that one moment a thousand instances--such trifling instances, some of them--of his goodness and devotion, his enduring love, his patient self-abnegation, flashed upon her, and her heart smote her with a bitter anguish as she perceived her own unworthiness.

“I had no right to take his love as I take the love of my dogs,” she thought; “giving him nothing in return for his devotion.” At first, as she read her husband’s epistle, she smiled at his talk of leaving her, and thought how easy a thing it would be to lay her hand upon his shoulder and draw him down to his old place at her feet. She forgot all about the cottage at Petersham when she thought this. And then, as she read farther and farther, she recognized the solemn meaning of the letter, and felt that it was indeed a farewell. Then a sudden mist came between her and the page; all the machinery in London seemed buzzing and booming in her ears; and she fell back amongst the downy cushion, whiter than the pure ground of the rosebud chintz which Harcourt Lowther had selected for the upholstery of her nest.

She recovered very quickly under the influence of half a bottle of toilet-vinegar; and then there were more confidences to be poured into Julia’s ear, when the maid, who was so sympathetic, and so ravenously eager to know why her mistress had fainted, was fairly out of the room.

Maude read Julia little bits of the letter, leaving off every now and then to demand pathetically _what_ she was to do.

“He surely c-c-couldn’t write like that, Julia, if he were what Harcourt Lowther says he is,” sobbed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “He says I spoke to him coldly and deliberately. Oh, if he could only know what a passion I was in! There must be some horrible mistake; and if there is, what a wretch I must have seemed to him last night! Julia, advise me! give me some help! My husband must not go to America. There is a whole week for me to

## act in. What am I to do?”

“How _can_ I advise you?” asked Julia. “I am so entirely in the dark--and you too. If Mr. Tredethlyn had given you _any_ explanation of his presence at that strange house, domiciled so familiarly with that strange woman, you might accept it--if you could--and believe him. But he does not even attempt to explain or to justify his conduct. He passes it over in a manner which, I must confess, seems very ominous. To me, Maude, his silence is a tacit confession of his guilt.”

Poor Maude turned the leaves of her husband’s letter, and looked wistfully at the blotted pages. If she could have only found some brief explanation of that Petersham business anywhere--in a postscript--a parenthesis! But there was none; and Mrs. Tredethlyn put the epistle into her pocket, and looked at Julia with a very rueful countenance. Unluckily, she forgot that she had brought no specific charge against her husband, but had only attacked him in that vaguely denunciatory manner which is so essentially feminine.

“What a child she is!” thought Miss Desmond, as she watched her friend’s tear-blotted face and quivering lip. “If _I_ had a pair of high-stepping ponies to drive in the Park, and a couple of grooms to sit behind me, I would demand no explanation of my husband’s absences, though he were to stay away from me for ten years at a stretch.”

But it was the very reverse of this convenient code of morality to which Julia gave utterance presently, when she spoke to Maude.

“You ask me for my advice,” she said. “If I am to give it frankly, I must own that in your place I would not touch Mr. Tredethlyn’s hand in friendship until he had accounted fully and conclusively for his presence in that garden yesterday. I would permit no reservations on the part of my husband; and I should be inclined to think that a secret kept from me was only another name for a wrong done to me.”

Maude was silent for some minutes, wiping the tears from her face, and trying to escape from the demonstrative sympathy of a Skye terrier, who had been frantic at the sight of his mistress’s distress; and then she exclaimed, with sudden energy that almost startled Miss Desmond,--

“Yes, I will take your advice, Julia; and Francis _shall_ explain himself--as--as I’m sure he can.”

This was a challenge which Julia was too wise to take up; for she saw that the wind had set violently in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour since Maude’s perusal of his letter.

“I will insist upon an explanation from my husband; but before seeing him I will do what I should have done yesterday. I will go to that cottage at Petersham, and _see_ the lady who was sitting in the garden with Francis yesterday afternoon. It is my right as a wife to know my husband’s friends.”

“You will see the--person,” exclaimed Julia, on the tips of her lips, as the French say.

“I will.”

“Well, perhaps, after all, it is not a bad plan,” answered Miss Desmond, after a pause. “And if you _do_ see that person, I dare say you will hear something unpleasant,” she thought: “it is only fair there should be some counterbalance to your grooms and ponies, even beyond Pickford’s vans, and the sharp corner in Dean Street, Park Lane.”

“Julia, you will go with me?” asked Maude, putting down her Skye terrier. “No, Floss, not to-day. Oh, I wonder whether _you_ were ever married, and had this sort of thing to go through!--You’ll go to Petersham with me, won’t you, Julia dear?”

“Of course I will,” answered Miss Desmond promptly; “it is a part of my _métier_. But how do you mean to go?”

“Oh, we’ll drive.”

“Your ponies?” asked Julia, spitefully.

The “steppers” were a late acquisition. Maude’s childish cry of rapture at the sight of the Countess of Zarborough’s equipage had sent Francis off to Tattersall’s to bid for a pair of black ponies that Harcourt Lowther and his set had pronounced “clippers.” You see an ignorant man’s love is such a vulgar passion that it will express itself in this sordid way.

“Oh, Julia,” cried Maude, “how _could_ you? As if I would drive those frivolous ponies with a frivolous parasol fastened to my whip, and those two listening grooms behind me, when my heart is almost broken by Frank’s conduct.”

“Then you will go in the barouche?”

“Yes, and I can leave the carriage some distance from the house,” Maude answered, with her hand upon the bell; “and we’ll go at once, Julia dear,--if you’re sure you’ve finished breakfast,” added Mrs. Tredethlyn, looking piteously at the cup of stagnant chocolate and unbroken roll, which bore witness to her own incapacity to eat or drink.

Of course Julia declared that she had breakfasted--as completely as a companion had any right to breakfast, she inferred by her manner; so the two ladies adjourned to their apartments. Mrs. Tredethlyn found her maid in her dressing-room, oppressed by such tender anxieties with regard to the adjustment of Maude’s bonnet and shawl, that she was not to be shaken off till her mistress stepped into the barouche, and even then contrived to be the medium of communication with the coachman, to the setting aside of a stolid Jeames, who was so utterly weary of life in general as not even to be often interested in other people’s business.

The confidante in white muslin is apt to have a hard time of it when Tilburina’s affairs go badly; but Julia endured her burden with sublime patience. Maude, bewailing the inconstancy of her husband one moment, and lauding his devotion in the next, might now and then degenerate into an inconsistent bore; but, at the worst, she was more endurable than Maude insolently happy,--a radiant floating creature, all lace flounces and gauzy sleeves, like one of Mr. Buckner’s portraits. Julia enacted her part of confidante very creditably during the drive from Stuccoville to Petersham, and submitted graciously to be left in the carriage, in a shady curve of the winding road, with the Skye terriers and the last new novel to keep her company, while Mrs. Tredethlyn went alone to face her rival.

Perhaps Maude’s heart sank just a little with something akin to fear, as she tripped along the dusty road in dainty high-heeled boots and flounced petticoats, whose embroideries flickered to and fro in shadowy arabesques upon the sunlit ground. She was not at all strong-minded. Imagine Waller’s Sacharissa stepping out of her coach in Eastchepe, with a negro page behind her, and one of the Duchess of Portsmouth’s favourite spaniels nestling in the perfumed lining of her muff, bent upon a visit to a money-lender; or Pope’s Belinda alighting from her sedan to attend a meeting of creditors. Imagine anything that is incongruous, or absurd, or impossible, and it will be scarcely more out of keeping than this picture of Maude Tredethlyn going alone to meet her rival, under the shelter of a point-lace parasol. And yet this injured young wife was as sincerely miserable as if she had worn sackcloth and ashes, or the sombre draperies which Miss Bateman has made so familiar to us in her impersonation of the jilted Leah.

Mrs. Tredethlyn went straight to the cottage with the old-fashioned iron gate and the ivy-bordered wall. A womanly instinct guided her, as by a kind of inspiration, to the spot where she had seen her husband so much at home with a nameless and unknown creature. An air of prim respectability pervaded the place, which Maude inspected as she waited for admission, and peered inquisitively through the iron scroll-work. There were none of the rose-coloured curtains and china flower-stands, the yelping lap-dogs and twittering birds, which Mrs. Tredethlyn had been taught to associate with those inhabitants of an outer world, in whom she perceived only overdone imitations of herself. Everything here had a prim countrified prettiness of its own; and looking across the smooth lawn, Maude saw a slender girlish figure in a cotton dress bending over a flower-bed, while a little boy stood by with a tiny watering-pot, whose contents he dribbled industriously over his own toes.

Maude’s summons was responded to by an elderly woman in black. She was very grim and stern, as people who dote upon small children usually are; and she was no other than the eminently respectable person at Chelsea, who wore rusty bombazine in mourning for the better days which lay far back in some remote period beyond the memory of her oldest acquaintance. This person carried Maude’s card to the lady in the cotton dress, and then swooped down upon the little boy with the watering-pot, and carried him away struggling.

Maude, still without the citadel, watched the girlish face as it bent over her card. She expected astonishment, confusion, defiance,--anything except what she saw, which was a half-pleased smile, a look of hesitation, and then a little glance towards the gate, and a cry of remonstrance to the elderly person now invisible.

“Oh, Mrs. Clinnock, how could you leave that lady outside? The key! ah, I see it’s in the gate.” Maude’s fancied rival had crossed the little lawn by this time, and Rosamond was only separated from Eleanor by the iron scroll-work. “Dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, how very rude you must think my nurse! But so many people have called, out of mere curiosity I am sure, and I am so afraid of strangers--Francis knows that--for he knows how often he has begged me to see you; and it was only yesterday that I gave way, and said he might tell you all about me. But I didn’t think you would come so soon,” said Rosamond, with sudden tears welling up to her innocent brown eyes. She had opened the gate and admitted Maude while she talked, and the two women were now standing face to face.

Mrs. Tredethlyn’s mystification was depicted upon her countenance, which at first expressed only her complete bewilderment; then a chilling expression came over her face, a scornful smile curved her lip, and she looked at her rival with her head poised as haughtily as ever Eleanor’s could have been when she offered Lord Clifford’s daughter that agreeable choice between the bowl and the dagger.

“Oh, I see,” she thought; “this person is trying to disarm my suspicions by her cool impertinence.”

“It was so kind of you to come,” murmured Rosamond, timidly. She was beginning to feel rather afraid of this haughty lady, who made no response to her warm greeting. “I did not think that I should see you so soon.”

“No, I dare say not,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn; “I should scarcely imagine that you expected to see me at all.”

Rosamond, otherwise Susan, clasped her hands and flushed crimson to the roots of her hair.

“Ah, then, you too are unkind, like my father,” she cried piteously. “You do not believe what Francis told you.”

Maude was almost too indignant to remark that piteous accent. It was not a gentle creature in distress that she saw. Jealousy looks through a medium that distorts the simplest objects into evil and threatening shapes. Mrs. Tredethlyn imagined that she beheld a shameless adventuress, who sought to disarm her justifiable suspicions by social histrionics.

“By what right do you call my husband by his Christian name?” she asked, indignantly.

“By what right!” stammered Susan, alarmed by the angry tones in which the question had been asked. “What else should I call him? I have called him Francis all my life, except when we were children, and then I called him Frank. Oh, he has been so good to me, Mrs. Tredethlyn! and he knows that the marriage was a real one. Oh, pray, pray don’t look so coldly at me! don’t doubt my word and his. I am as true and pure a wife as you are, though I have no husband’s arm to lean upon, though even the name my husband gave me may be a false one.”

Maude stared at the earnest face in new bewilderment. Not even jealousy could distort the expression of that face into anything but innocence.

“What does it all mean?” she cried at last; “who and what are you?”

“Susan Turner, Oliver Tredethlyn’s daughter and Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin,” answered Susan, considerably puzzled in her turn; “who else could you suppose me to be, Mrs. Tredethlyn? Surely Francis told you all about me, or you could never have known where to find me.”

“No, he told me nothing,” exclaimed Maude; and then she pounced suddenly upon poor astonished Susy, and kissed her as she had never in all her life kissed any one before.

“Oh, you dear!” she cried; “oh, you darling! To think that you should be only his cousin after all, when I thought that--when I was wicked enough to think----”

Mrs. Tredethlyn did not say what she had thought, but bestowed another shower of kisses upon Susan.

“You pet!” she exclaimed; “and to think that I should never guess you were his cousin; and that he should never tell me, the silly fellow! And he let me go on at him too last night as if he had committed all sorts of crimes, and did not even deny them. And you are like him too. Yes, I’m sure you are; there’s an expression about the eyes. Yes, there really is. Oh, how dearly I shall love you! I remember Francis speaking of you once; but he was very reserved upon the subject, and I did not like to question him. And so you really are his uncle Oliver’s daughter! then we are cousins, you know, dear; almost sisters--and I never had a sister--or even a friend who was _quite_ like a sister,” added Maude, with a remorseful recollection of Miss Desmond waiting in the carriage.

She could have run on for an hour at a stretch, in her delight at the discovery that her husband was not a villain. The two women walked up and down the lawn together, while Susan related all her sad little history, and received Maude’s tender assurances of sympathy and love.

Mrs. Tredethlyn was told how good her husband had been to his friendless cousin; and was pleased to dwell fondly on the story of Frank’s kindness, his selection of that pretty house, his purchase of the furniture, and, above all, his goodness to the little boy.

Maude wanted Susan to go straight home with her in the carriage; but the Cornish girl clung to her sheltered home, and the iron gate that screened her from intrusive strangers.

“I am not used to the people amongst whom you live,” she said; “it is very kind of you to wish to take me--but I could never be happy amongst strangers; and Robert and I are _so_ happy here.”

“And I came to break in upon your happiness like a horrible jealous fury,” cried Maude; “but you see good has come out of evil; for now we have met, we shall love each other dearly always, shan’t we, Susan? Call me Maude, please. And oh, my dear Susan, I have all sorts of troubles still to go through; for Frank was so offended by what I said last night, that he has written me a dreadful letter, in which he says he means to sail for America directly. But of course he won’t. He never could leave me like that, could he, dear? And when I leave you, I shall drive straight home; and if he hasn’t been home, I shall go on to his solicitors, Messrs. Something and Something, Gray’s Inn,--I shall know their names when I see them in the Directory,--and of course they’ll know his address wherever he is; and I shall go to him, and ask him to forgive me for having behaved so badly, and to-morrow he and I will come together, Susan. And now kiss me once more, dear, and _au revoir_; for I have a friend waiting for me in the carriage a little way off; and if her book doesn’t happen to be interesting, I’m afraid she’ll be cross, for I am sure I must have been an unconscionable time.”

There was a little embrace, and then Susan opened the gate and Maude tripped away. The vulgar gravel seemed like empyreal air under her high-heeled boots this time; so changed were her feelings since she had discovered how deeply she had wronged her husband by the shapeless jealousies that Harcourt Lowther had inspired in her breast.

Julia looked with astonishment at her friend’s altered countenance as Maude apologized for the length of her absence, while the _blasé_ footman let down the steps; she was still more astonished when the carriage drove townwards, and Maude gushed into French, to the discomfiture of the footman, who had a habit of looking behind him for imaginary vehicles when his mistress’s conversation happened to interest him.

In French, Maude informed Julia that the mythic rival had melted into a “little cousin,” who was “all that there is of the most charming,” “an all young girl,” “a candid angel,” whom Mrs. Tredethlyn was ready to take to her heart forthwith. Julia found it a great deal harder to sympathize with Maude’s happiness than with her misery.

But the happiness did not last very long; for on inquiry at Stuccoville, Maude found that her husband had not been home; and on penetrating Holborn-wards to Gray’s Inn, to the disgust of the languid footman, she met with a second disappointment in the offices of Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon, who had heard nothing of the absent Mr. Tredethlyn. After this Maude drove homewards with a very sad countenance, and was glad to shrink from even Julia’s sympathy, and to hide herself in her own rooms, where she paced disconsolately to and fro, listening for the crunching wheels, and banging door of a hansom cab, and stopping every now and then to look hopelessly out into the monotonous street.

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