CHAPTER XXXIX
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TOO LATE.
A long miserable week wore itself slowly out after the night in which Francis Tredethlyn had turned his back upon a house which he had never been allowed to find a home. Through all the week there were no tidings of Maude’s departed husband; but when the week was over, a formal letter from Mr. Kursdale acquainted her with Mr. Tredethlyn’s arrangements for her welfare, and with the fact that he had embarked the day before on board the steam-vessel _Kingfisher_, bound for Buenos Ayres. The news inflicted as great a shock upon Maude as if her husband’s letter announcing his intended departure had never been written. To the last she had believed, that when the time for action came, his resolution would fail him all at once, and he would hurry back to her, faithful and devoted as in the earliest days of their brief married life, when he had nursed her Skye terriers, and sat patiently for an hour at a stretch in a haberdasher’s shop while she selected ribands and laces. She had written him a penitent letter, and had enclosed it to Mr. Kursdale, entreating that gentleman to deliver it to his client whenever he saw him. She had not thought it possible that, even if Francis persisted in his intention of leaving England, he would leave without an interview with his solicitor. But when Maude drove post-haste to Gray’s Inn, and presented herself in the lawyer’s office, she found that there had been no interview. Francis had communicated with his solicitor by letter only, and his clear and concise epistle bore the date of the very day on which he was to start for Plymouth, whence the _Kingfisher_ was to sail.
The letter thus dated had arrived at the lawyer’s office after business hours; and when Mr. Kursdale opened it next morning, there was little doubt that the _Kingfisher_ was outward bound with Francis Tredethlyn on board her. Maude made a confidant of her husband’s solicitor. A family lawyer is a kind of father confessor in the matter of secrets, and has generally outlived the capacity of surprise as completely as those imperturbable disciples of St. Ignatius Loyola who are irreverently entitled “crows.” The despondent wife told Mr. Kursdale that Francis had left home in consequence of a slight misunderstanding--(was any conjugal quarrel ever yet described by the belligerents as anything _more_ than a slight misunderstanding?)--and she implored him to assist her in bringing about her husband’s speedy return.
“But do you think he has really sailed?” she asked; “do you think he can have been so cruel as to leave England without even giving me the opportunity of imploring him to remain?”
Mr. Kursdale shook his head gravely.
“There is nothing in his letter to me which indicates indifference to your wishes,” he said; “it is only a business letter; but in a practical way it is the strongest evidence of a husband’s devotion that ever came to my knowledge. We lawyers are a matter-of-fact set of men, and we are apt to form our conclusions in a matter-of-fact way. What other people would treat as an affair of sentiment, we look at as an affair of figures; and I must say, Mrs. Tredethlyn, that gauged by that standard, your husband comes out nobly.”
“But I want him to come back to me,” Maude exclaimed, simply; “I don’t want to be rich--or to live like a woman of fashion. He wrongs me most cruelly when he thinks that I married him for his money. I married him because he was good to my father. Do you think I could accept the income which that letter places at my disposal, knowing that my husband has left his native country because of me? Tell me what I am to do, Mr. Kursdale. I know that Mr. Tredethlyn is unhappy, and that a few words from me would set all right. What am I to do?”
“We must try to send him the few words, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn,” answered the lawyer, cheerfully. “South America is not so very far off nowadays; and you know that even in Alexander Pope’s time a sigh might be wafted from Indus to the Pole, by means of ocean postage. We’ll get your letter delivered to Mr. Tredethlyn as quickly as the improvements of modern science will allow, you may depend upon it. Shall I send the letter you enclosed to me the other day? Perhaps you would like to add something to it--another postscript, eh? Ladies have such a _penchant_ for postscripts,” said the lawyer, lapsing into mild facetiousness, which he imagined to be of an eminently consolatory character. There are people who believe that a feeble joke is an infallible specific for a deeply rooted grief.
“I will send a clerk off to Plymouth by the next train,” said Mr. Kursdale, with his hand upon the spring of a little bell beside him. He spoke as coolly as if he had been talking of sending a clerk over the way. “If by any chance the _Kingfisher_ has not sailed when the young man arrives, your husband will have the letter before dark. If the _Kingfisher_ has sailed, the letter must be sent on by the next mail. At the worst, Mr. Tredethlyn may be back in six or seven weeks.”
In six or seven weeks! It seemed a very long time; but on receiving the lawyer’s letter announcing her husband’s departure, Maude had fancied that he was lost to her for ever. With what wonderful intelligence we can perceive the value of anything we have lost! In your daily walks, O modest collector of household treasures! you will see a little bit of china, a picture, an apostle spoon, a quaint old volume in a shop-window,--and, intending to look in and bargain for it some day when you have leisure, you will pass it a hundred times, indifferent as to its merits, half uncertain whether it is worth buying; but you discover some day that it is gone, and then in a moment the doubtful shepherdess becomes the rarest old Chelsea, the dirty-looking little bit of landscape an undeniable Crome, the battered silver spoon of unquestionable antiquity, the quaintly bound book a choice Elzevir. The thing is lost; and we regret it for all that it might have been, as well as for all that it was, and there are no bounds to the extravagance we would commit to regain the chance of possessing it.
It was something after this fashion, perhaps, that Mrs. Tredethlyn regretted her husband, as she drove home disconsolately after her interview with the lawyer, to await the result of his clerk’s journey. She would have gone herself to Plymouth if she could have done any more than the clerk; but she had a dim belief that if there was infallibility anywhere on earth, it was to be found in the office of an old-established solicitor, and she thought that Mr. Kursdale’s accredited agent could not fail to effect some good.
Her disappointment was very bitter the next day when she received a note from the solicitor, informing her that the _Kingfisher_ had sailed twelve hours before the clerk arrived at Plymouth.
After this Maude could only await the result of her letter. Six or seven weeks seemed such a weary time as she looked forward to it; and it might be as long as that, or even longer, before any tidings from Francis could reach her. She went to her father, to pour her sorrows into his ear; but though he received her very affectionately, she could see that he blamed her severely for the folly which had driven Francis Tredethlyn from his home.
She would have gone to stay at the Cedars during this dreary period; but she had a nervous dread of not being on the spot to receive any possible communication from her husband, so she remained amid the grand hotel-like splendour of the Stuccoville mansion; though her neighbours were daily departing for distant British watering-places, or on the first stage of continental wanderings, to toil amidst Alpine glaciers, or to lounge at German gaming-tables.
Mrs. Tredethlyn was very glad to see London growing empty; but before her acquaintance departed for their autumnal relaxations they had ample time to discuss her husband’s disappearance and her own sudden withdrawal from society. The fact of that slight misunderstanding, which Maude had been obliged to confess to the solicitor, had become patent to all Stuccoville through the agency of loquacious maids and languid footmen, and had assumed every possible and impossible complexion in feminine debates. So Maude stood listlessly at one of the windows in her spacious bedchamber, sheltered by the voluminous curtains and the flowers in the balcony, and looked despondently at happy family parties driving away to railway stations with cargoes of parasols and umbrellas, and deliciously fluffy carriage-rugs and foot-muffs. Other people always seem so happy. The lives of those smiling Stuccovillians might not have been unclouded in their serenity; but Maude watched them very sadly, remembering how she and her husband might have been starting in the twilight for the Dover mail, like that merry young couple from the house over the way.
Surely she must have loved him very dearly, or she scarcely could have regretted him so much. If she had been questioned as to the real state of her feelings on this point, she could not have given any very clear reply to the question. She only knew that her husband had been very good to her, and that she had repaid his devotion with neglect and indifference. Maude had been a spoiled child, it must be remembered, and there may have been something of a spoiled child’s useless remorse in her penitence; but she was very penitent. All her life for the last year had been crowded with proofs of Francis Tredethlyn’s unbounded love; and, looking back upon them, she could not remember one instance in which she had been sufficiently grateful for his affection.
“Those silly young men at the Cedars used to make a fool of me with their empty flatteries,” she thought, remorsefully; “and I treated Frank as I had learned to treat them, accepting his generous devotion as indifferently as I had accepted their unmeaning compliments.”
There was one thing that Maude did not remember as she looked back at her past life, and that was Harcourt Lowther’s influence. She did not know how much of her indifference to her husband had been engendered by the subtle sarcasms of her jilted lover; nor did she know how the schemer had practised upon her girlish love of society, in order to widen the gulf that divided her from Francis Tredethlyn. Her errors as a wife had chiefly arisen from want of leisure. She had found no time to adapt herself to her husband’s tastes--no time to elevate and refine him by association--no time to give him any return for those practical proofs of his affection in the way of jewels and carriages, thorough-bred steppers, and hundred-guinea shawls, which he was constantly lavishing upon her; and, worse than all, she had found no time to inquire how he passed his life, or in what circles he sought the happiness she had never tried to provide for him in his home.
“I will ask him to complete the purchase of the Berkshire estate when he comes back to me,” she thought; “and then we shall be able to begin a new life away from this perpetual whirlpool of society; and I can drive to the meet when Frank hunts, and even take an interest in the stables. Country stables are so pretty; and it’s so nice to see a favourite horse looking over the door of his loose-box, with a big tabby cat sitting on the wooden ledge beside him, and honeysuckle blowing about his head. But one’s horses might as well be at the North Pole for all one can see of them in a London mews, where there are always dreadful men in shirt-sleeves, and cross-looking women hanging up clothes,” mused Mrs. Tredethlyn, with a vivid recollection of the prospect which all the ground glass in her fernery could not quite shut out.
While she was thinking very penitently of the past, and weaving pleasant schemes for the future; while she was perpetually counting the days which must elapse before Francis returned to her, always supposing that the remorseful words of her letter found their way straight to his heart, as she implicitly believed they would; while she was praying daily and nightly for his safe preservation in tempest and danger, Maude Tredethlyn took up the “Times” newspaper one morning as she loitered listlessly over a lonely breakfast-table, and the first paragraph that met her eyes was the announcement of the _Kingfisher’s_ total destruction by fire, and the entire loss of passengers and crew.
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