CHAPTER IV

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TREDETHLYN’S LUCK.

Francis Tredethlyn had to wait a very long time before there could be any possibility of a letter from the Gray’s Inn solicitors, but he endured the delay with perfect tranquillity of mind; and if either of the two men seemed anxious for the arrival of the letter, that man was Harcourt Lowther, and not Francis Tredethlyn. The ensign had a trick of alluding to his servant’s good fortune whenever things went especially ill with himself.

“Here am I without a friend in the world to lend me a five-pound note,” he would remark, impatiently, “and there are you with a chance of a nice little legacy from that old uncle of yours. I shouldn’t wonder if you stand in for four or five hundred at the least.”

“I don’t think it, sir,” the valet always answered, coolly. “I’ve heard our neighbours say, that what with farming, what with mining, and dabbling a good bit with funds and railway shares, and such-like, my uncle must be as rich as a Jew; but for all that, I don’t look to be much better off for any thing that he’ll have left me. I suppose he’s left every thing to my cousin Susan, seeing that he had neither kith nor kin except her and me. But somehow or other I can’t imagine his parting with his money to any one, even after his death. I almost fancy that he’d rather have tied it up, if he could, so that the interest upon it would go on accumulating for ever and ever, thinking as he might perhaps, being old and eccentric, that he’d have a kind of satisfaction, even in his grave, from knowing that the money was going on getting more and more, instead of being spent or squandered.”

Francis Tredethlyn did not make this remark in any spirit of ill-nature; he spoke like a man who states a plain fact.

“I dare say he was a regular old curmudgeon,” Mr. Lowther answered, “but he must leave his money to some one, and the fact of these lawyers advertising for you is ample proof that he must have left some of it to you.”

Such a conversation as this occurred pretty frequently during the long interval in which Francis Tredethlyn waited for the answer to his letter. Sometimes, when Harcourt Lowther was in a very bad temper, he would accuse his attendant of having grown proud and insolent and lazy, since the advent of that _Times_ newspaper, which the ensign had borrowed from Mr. Corbett; but every one of the accusations was as groundless as many other of the officer’s complaints against people and things in general. There was no change in Francis Tredethlyn: he did his work cheerfully and well, obeyed orders in a frank, manly spirit, and behaved himself altogether in a most exemplary manner.

The time when a letter from England might be expected came round at last; but Francis Tredethlyn evinced no anxiety for the arrival of the solicitors’ epistle. A long season of drought had given way before a sudden downfall of rain, and Harcourt Lowther, who had planned a couple of days’ kangaroo hunting, and had made all necessary arrangements for the performance of his duties by a good-natured and efficient colour-sergeant, found himself a prisoner in his cottage at Port Arthur, with nothing to do but wait for a change in the weather.

It was very tiresome. The accomplished, light-hearted Harcourt Lowther, who could take life so pleasantly in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia or Belgravia, to whom a summer afternoon amongst a group of fashionable gossips in the smoking-room of his favourite club was only too short, found this terrible Tasmanian day intolerably long. He had tried every available way of getting rid of his time. He had sketched a little, and read a little, and played the flute a little, and smoked a great deal, and had relieved the oppression of his spirits by an incalculable number of yawns, and a little occasional bad language. And now, having exhausted all these resources, he stood with his head leaning listlessly against the roughly finished sash of the window, watching the convict labourers at work under the heavy rain. He derived some faint ray of comfort from the signs of those two men. At any rate, there were some people in the world worse off than himself,--unlucky wretches who were obliged to work in wet weather, and wear a hideous dress, and eat coarse unpalatable food, or food that appeared abominably coarse and unpalatable in the eyes of Mr. Harcourt Lowther, who had been known upon occasion to turn up his nose at the culinary masterpieces of Soyer and Francatelli.

“Why don’t they kill themselves?” muttered the ensign; “they could drive rusty nails into their veins, and make an end of themselves somehow. There are plenty of poisonous things in my garden that they might eat, and make a finish of their lives that way; but they don’t. They go on day after day drudging and toiling, and enduring their lives, somehow or other. I suppose they hope to get away some day. How ever should I bear my life if I didn’t hope to get away--if I didn’t hope it would come to an end pretty soon?”

Mr. Lowther, having exhausted the pleasure to be derived from a contemplation of the convicts, took to pacing up and down the two rooms; in the inner of which Francis Tredethlyn was busy cleaning his master’s guns.

Walking backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and passing the valet every time, Harcourt Lowther was fain to talk to him; rather for the pleasure and relief of hearing his own voice, than from any desire to be friendly towards his vassal.

“No letter yet, Tredethlyn?” he said.

“No, sir; but it may come any day.”

“And you wait for it as quietly as if a legacy, more or less, was nothing to you. I suppose if they send you a remittance, you’ll be wanting to buy your discharge, and leave this place; and I shall have to get another servant,--some awkward, ignorant boor, perhaps?”

“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty as good as me, I dare say, among our fellows. Other folks may have been brought up respectably, and taken to soldiering, like me. And as for buying my discharge, I don’t say but I should be glad to do that, if those lawyer people gave me the chance. I should be glad to get back to England and see my little cousin Susy. I always call her little Susy, because I can’t help thinking of her as she was when I remember her first, when she and I were boy and girl sweethearts together. I’ve thought of her a deal since I got the news of her father’s death, and I feel anxious about her, somehow or other, when I fancy her left alone among strangers.”

Harcourt Lowther, always walking backwards and forwards between the two rooms, was in the sitting-room when his servant said this. He stopped to look out of the window again, and there seemed to be a kind of dismal fascination for him in the convicts, towards whom his eyes wandered in a moody, absent-minded stare.

“And where do you expect to find her--your cousin, I mean--when you do go back to England?” he asked presently.

“At the old farm, sir, to be sure. Where should I find her but there? Poor little soul! she’s never known any other home but that, and isn’t likely to leave it in a hurry of her own free will.”

“Humph!” muttered the officer, “there’s no calculating upon the changes that take place in this world. I never expect to find any thing as I left it when I return to a place or people that I’ve been absent from for any length of time. I expect to find plenty of changes when I get back to the civilised world again. Do you suppose the people _there_ can afford to waste their time thinking of wretched exiles _here_? Life with them is utterly different from what it is with us. When I left England, I was engaged to a beautiful girl with fifty thousand pounds or so for her fortune,--a girl who would have married me, and given me a grand start in life, if it hadn’t been for her father; but do you think I expect to find her in the same mind when I go back? Do you think two years’ absence won’t act as a sponge, and wipe _my_ image out of her thoughts? What has a beautiful, frivolous creature like that to do with constancy? Every man who looks at her falls over head and ears in love with her. She is fed upon flattery and adulation. Is it probable, or natural, or even possible that she will remember _me_?”

It was not likely that Mr. Lowther would ask this question of his valet. He asked it of himself, rather, in a peevish and complaining spirit, and seemed to find a dismal comfort in harping on his wrongs and his miseries.

“I was a fool to think that Maude Hillary could be constant to me!” he muttered, angrily. In his anger against a world that had treated him so badly, he was angry with himself for having been so much a fool as to expect better treatment. He walked to a little looking-glass hanging over the mantelpiece, and looked at his handsome face. Was it the face of a man who was to have no place in the world? Were his many graces of person, his charm of manner, his versatility of mind, to serve for nothing after all?

“When I think of the fellows who get on in the world, I feel inclined to make an end of all this by cutting my throat,” he said, as he frowned at the image in the glass.

He felt the region of the jugular vein softly with the ends of his fingers as he spoke, and wondered whether death by the severance of that important artery was a very painful finish for a man to make. He thought of how he might look if Francis Tredethlyn, finding him late to rise one morning, broke into his room and saw him lying in the sunny little chamber deluged with blood and stone dead. He had been very religiously brought up, amongst gentle, true-hearted women; but there was no more pious compunction in his mind as he thought of suicide than there might have been in the mind of an aboriginal inhabitant of the Solomon Islands. He had a mother at home--a mother who believed in him and idolized him, to the disparagement of all other creatures; but no image of her grief and despair arose between him and the scheme of a desperate death. His thoughts travelled in a narrow circle, of which self was the unchanging centre.

“I have heard of men making away with themselves on the very eve of some event which would have made a complete change in their fortunes,” he thought presently. “I never read the story of a suicide that did not seem more or less the story of a fool. No, my death shall never make a paragraph for a newspaper. I must be very hard pushed when I come to that. This place gives me the blue-devils, and everything looks black to me out here. I wish Abel Janz Tasman and Captain Cook had perished before ever they sighted this dismal land. I wish all the lot of petty Dutch traders and navigators had come to an untimely end before ever they discovered any one of these miserable islands, which have been a paradise for convicts and scoundrels, and a hell for gentlemen, during the last half-century. How was I to know, when I bought a commission in her Majesty’s service, that the first stage on the road to martial glory was to be the post of head-gaoler at a settlement in the Antipodes? The papers talk of a change in the transportation system, a change that will rid Van Diemen’s Land of its present delightful inhabitants; but no change is likely to come about in my time. I shall have to drag my chain out to the last link, I dare say. It’s better to be born lucky than rich, says the proverb; but how about the poor devils who are neither rich nor lucky?”

A rap on the little door, that opened out of the sitting-room on to a patch of garden which lay between the house and the high road, startled Mr. Lowther out of his long reverie.

“It’s the fellow with the letters,” he cried; and before Francis Tredethlyn could emerge from the inner room, his master had opened the door, and had taken a little packet of letters, newspapers, and magazines from the man who brought them. “One from my mother; one from--yes--from Maude, at last; the _Times_, _Punch_, _Blackwood’s_, _United Service_, and the lawyer’s letter!--‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’ eh? The legacy must be something more than five hundred, my man, or they’d hardly dub you Esquire.”

He tossed the letter over to his servant as he spoke, and looked at the Cornishman furtively, with something like envy expressed in his look. Francis Tredethlyn received the lawyers’ epistle very coolly, and retired into the adjoining room to read it, while his master sat at the table in the parlour, tearing off the flimsy envelope of a letter with a hasty nervous hand.

“From Maude!” he muttered. “At last, my lady: at last, at last!”

The letter was a very long one, written in a clear and bold yet sufficiently feminine hand, on slippery pink paper scented with a perfume that had survived an Australian voyage. The contents of the letter must have been tolerably pleasing to Harcourt Lowther, for he smiled as he read, and seemed to forget all about Francis Tredethlyn’s legacy.

“I miss you very much, though papa surrounds us with gaiety; indeed, I think we have been gayer than ever lately; and he never seems so happy as when our dear old lawn is crowded with visitors. But I miss you, Harcourt, in spite of all the cruel insinuations in your last letter. The summer evenings seem long and dreary when I think of you, so far away, so unhappy, as your letters tell me you are, Harcourt, though you are too unselfish to admit the truth in plain words. I scarcely open the piano once in a month, now that I have no one to play concertante duets. I scarcely care for a new opera; for the men who come into our box bore me to death with their vapid talk, and I know that not one of them understands what he talks about. I am not happy, Harcourt, though you taunt me with my wealth and my position, and the difference between our lives. I am not happy, for our future seems to grow darker and darker every day. I have mentioned you to my father several times, and every time he seems more angry than the last; so now I feel that your name is tacitly tabooed; and any chance allusion to you from the lips of strangers makes me tremble and turn cold. I have tried in vain to comprehend the reason of my father’s aversion to any thought of a marriage between you and me. I have been so much a spoiled child, that to be thwarted or opposed on any subject seems strange to me, most of all when that subject is so near my heart. I can scarcely think that my dear father would allow any consideration of fortune to stand in the way of happiness, and yet that is the only consideration that can influence him, for I know that he always liked and admired you. You must awhile be patient: what I can do I will. And you must trust me, dear Harcourt, and not pain me again as you have pained me by those unkind doubts of my constancy. You know that money has never been any consideration with me; and you ought to know that I would willingly lose every penny of my fortune rather than sacrifice my promise to you.”

“O yes; that’s all very well!” muttered Mr. Lowther peevishly, after having read this part of Miss Hillary’s epistle twice over; “but Lionel Hillary’s daughter with fifty thousand pounds or so, and without a penny, are two very different people. Not but what she’s always a beautiful girl and a charming girl; but a man can have his pick of charming and beautiful girls, if _that’s_ all he wants to set him up in life. I love her, Heaven knows; and the sight of her writing sends a thrill through my veins like the touch of her hand, or the fluttering of her breath upon my cheek. But poverty makes a man practical, and I think I never read a letter that had less of the practical in it than this letter. It’s a woman’s epistle all over. We must be patient, and wait till we’re worn out by waiting, and the engagement between us becomes a chain that binds us both from better things, and the sound of each other’s name becomes a nuisance to us from its associations of trouble and responsibility. That’s what a long engagement generally comes to. If I’d distinguished myself in India, led a desperate charge against orders, or taken the gate of an Affghan fortress, or done something reckless and mad-headed and lucky, and could have gone back with a captaincy, and a dash of newspaper celebrity about my name, I might have hoped that old Hillary, in a moment of maudlin after-dinner generosity, would have given his consent to my marriage with Maude. But how am I to present myself at Twickenham, and say, ‘I have been taking care of convicts for the last two years,--not particularly well, for more convicts have escaped into the bush in my time than in any other man’s time, according to the reports,--and I have come back to England with the same rank that I had when I left, and with less money than I took away with me’? Can I go to Lionel Hillary and say that? Is that the sort of argument which will induce a man to give me his daughter and her fortune?”

He went back to Miss Hillary’s letter. It was only a frivolous letter, after all; and it contained more intelligence about a morning concert in Hanover Square, a regatta at Ryde, and a preternaturally sagacious Skye-terrier, than was likely to be gratifying to a discontented exile at Port Arthur. But Mr. Lowther was fain to content himself as he might with the pretty girlish gossip. It was something, after all his grumbling, to receive the assurance that he was not entirely forgotten by the only daughter and sole heiress of one of the richest merchants in the city of London.

He looked up presently from his letter, to see Francis Tredethlyn standing in the doorway between the two rooms, pale to the lips, and clutching at his throat as if he had some difficulty in breathing.

“What’s the matter, man?” asked the ensign; “hasn’t the old chap left you any money, after all?”

“It isn’t that, sir,” gasped the soldier; “there’s money enough and to spare. It’s my cousin Susy; that poor little innocent creature, that was as pure as the apple-blossoms on the gnarled old trees in the orchard when I left home. She’s done something, sir--something that turned her father against her. She’s gone away, sir, and no one knows where she’s gone, or what’s come of her, or whether she’s dead or alive. And her father disinherited her, poor lost lamb; and--that’ll tell you all about the fortune, sir, if you want to know about it.” Francis Tredethlyn threw the lawyer’s letter upon the table before his master, and walked away to the window--the same window at which the ensign had stood looking out at the convicts half an hour before.

Harcourt Lowther read the lawyer’s letter, at first with a listless, indifferent air, and then as eagerly as if he had been reading his own death-warrant. It was a long letter, worded in a very formal manner, but it set forth the fact that the fortune left by Oliver Tredethlyn to his nephew Francis amounted to something over thirty thousand a year.

For some minutes after this fact had been made clear to him Harcourt Lowther sat with the open letter before him, staring at the lines. Then suddenly the blank stupor upon his face gave way to a look of despair. The ensign flung his head and arms upon the table, and burst into tears.

“I have been eating my own heart in this place for nearly two years,” he sobbed, “and not one ray of light--no, by the heaven above me! not one--has dawned upon my life; and a valet, a private soldier, the fellow who scours my rooms and blacks my boots, has thirty thousand a year left him!”

There was something so terrible in this hysterical outburst of rage and envy, something so utterly piteous in this unmanly revolt against another man’s good fortune, that Francis Tredethlyn forgot his own trouble before the aspect of his master’s degradation.

“Don’t, sir,” he cried, “for God’s sake, don’t do that! All the riches in the world wouldn’t pay a man for taking on like that. If you want money, you’re welcome to borrow some of mine as soon as ever I get the power to lend it. There’s more than I care to have, or could ever spend. You’ll be welcome to what you want, Mr. Lowther. I don’t set much account upon money, and I don’t think I ever shall; and the thoughts of this fortune don’t give me half the pleasure I’ve felt in the gift of a crown-piece long ago, when I was a little lad. I suppose it was because I thought then there was nothing in all the world that five shillings wouldn’t buy, and because I’m wiser now, and know there are some things a million of money can’t purchase. The news of this money has brought the thoughts of my father and my mother back to me, Mr. Lowther. I’d give every sixpence of it, if it could bring back the past, and pay out the bailiff’s man that was sitting by our kitchen-fire at home when my mother lay ill up-stairs. But it can’t do that. My father and mother both died poor, and all this money can’t buy back one of the sorrowful days they spent in the old farm, when things went from bad to worse, and debt and ruin came down upon us. I don’t seem to care for the money, Mr. Lowther; I am dazed and bewildered, somehow, by the greatness of the sum, but I don’t seem to care.”

The ensign had calmed himself by this time. He got up and brushed the tears from his eyes, real tears of rage, envy, mortification, and despair. There was a faint blush upon his face, the one evidence of his shame which he could not suppress in a moment, but all other evidences of feeling had passed away.

“You’re a good fellow, Tredethlyn,” he said, “an excellent simple-hearted fellow; as simple-hearted as a baby,--for who but a baby ever talked as you talk about this money? and I congratulate you upon your good luck. I see these lawyer fellows send you a bill for a couple of hundred; that’ll buy you off here pleasantly, and get you back to England. My advice to you is to get back as fast as ever you can, and enter into possession of your property. It seems a complicated kind of estate from what I can make out--mining property, and agricultural property, and shares in half the speculations of modern times,--but it’s a great estate, and that’s all you want to know. Go back; and as soon as ever I can get away from this accursed hole, I’ll look you up in London; and I--I _will_ borrow a little of that money you generously offer, and I’ll turn bear leader, and show you what life is in the upper circle, to which thirty thousand a year is the universal ‘open sesame.’”

The ensign slapped his hand upon his servant’s shoulder with a jovial air, and spoke almost as gaily as if Oliver Tredethlyn’s fortune was to be in some way or other a stroke of good luck for himself.

“Thank you, sir,” Francis answered, thoughtfully, “you’re very good; but I don’t care to force myself in among grand folks because I’m rich enough to do as they do. I’ve got a task before me, and it may be a long one.”

“A task!”

“Yes; I’ve got to look for my cousin.”

“Your cousin, Susan Tredethlyn!--the girl whose portrait you showed me?”

“Yes, sir. All this money would have been hers, most likely, if she hadn’t done something to turn my uncle against her. I can’t forget that, you see, sir; and the first use I make of the money will be to spend some of it in looking after her.”

“Susan Tredethlyn,” muttered Harcourt Lowther,--“Susan Tredethlyn. That portrait you showed me was a very bad one, for I haven’t the least notion of what your cousin is like.”

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