CHAPTER IX
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JULIA DESMOND MAKES HERSELF AGREEABLE.
Captain Masters drove Lionel Hillary’s phaeton to the Cedars, when the crowd in the sunny gardens before the Château de Bourbon had dispersed, and only a few scattered groups still lingered about the pleasant home of exiled royalty. Amongst which loiterers might be observed some lively gentlemen of the occasional-reporter species, who wanted to ascertain whether there would not be something in the champagne and lobster-salad way before the _fête_ was finished. Captain Masters drove his friend Mr. Somerset back to the Cedars in the mail-phaeton, while Lionel Hillary and Francis Tredethlyn went home with the ladies in the landau.
The man who had been a private soldier only a few months before that day, and who had not yet been able to realize the change made in his position by the inheritance of thirty thousand a year, found himself oppressed by a strange feeling as he sat in Miss Hillary’s open carriage with his back to the horses, surrounded by billows of silk and lace and muslin, a surging sea of feminine draperies, from which a faint perfume was wafted towards him as the summer wind blew in his face. It was not so much that he was ill at ease in that feminine presence, or in any way daunted by the fire of two pairs of handsome eyes. The feeling which oppressed him was rather a sense of unreality. He was like a child at a pantomime, who sees a stage-fairy for the first time, and cannot believe that the resplendent creature is only flesh and blood. He looked at Maude Hillary, and thought of his cousin Susan’s rosy cheeks and brown hair shaded by the familiar dimity sun-bonnet. There were men in the world who might aspire to marry such a creature as this Miss Hillary. He tried to imagine the sort of man who might lift his eyes to that divinity; and there arose in his mind the picture of a grandiose creature with yellow whiskers and a geranium in his button-hole. The æsthetic element in Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind was as yet very imperfectly developed; and his idea of a lover befitting Maude Hillary leaned rather to the gaudy king’s-pattern order of mankind.
The Australian merchant sat with his head leaning back against the cushions of the carriage and his eyes closed. His headache was, if anything, worse, he confessed, in answer to Maude’s anxious inquiries. He did not speak three times during the homeward drive, and his daughter rarely took her eyes from his face. She was very fond of him, and displayed her affection for him now as frankly as she had done when she had been a little girl in a white frock, sitting on his knee after dinner, and eating unwholesome fruits and confections out of his plate. She watched him now with a tender anxiety in her face, and seemed almost unconscious of the presence of the big soldier-like individual with a bronzed countenance and close-cropped black hair. But Francis Tredethlyn was not entirely neglected, for Miss Desmond appeared determined to atone for Maude’s want of courtesy. She had heard the Cornishman’s story from Mr. Somerset, who had heard it from a gentleman whom he described as “a fellow in the 11th Hussars;” and the handsome Julia felt some little interest in the hero of the narrative. An ignorant young man, a farmer’s son, who has suddenly come into a fortune of thirty thousand a year, is not the sort of person to be met with every day. Julia remembered that dreary ruin, that tall stone gaol on the bare hill beyond Limerick, which sounded so well when casually alluded to as Castle Desmond; but whose image chilled her as it rose, dismal and stony, before her mind’s eye. She remembered the muddy roads, the murderous ruts, the broad acres of irredeemable bog, the long rank grass waving on the roofs of tumbledown stone cabins, the gaunt pigs and gaunter peasantry; and a feeling that was not altogether ignoble kindled a sudden flush upon her handsome face. What could not be done for Castle Desmond and those ill-used peasantry by a chieftainess who should have thirty thousand a year at her command! She fancied herself a kind of fairy queen, beneath whose wand pleasant homesteads might arise on those desolate hills, and yellow cornfields spread a golden mantle over the valleys now so bare and empty. Miss Desmond’s lot in life was altogether exceptional, and the sentimental dreams which come to some young women had no lodgment in her brain. She looked her fate straight in the face, and was eager to make the best of any opportunity that might fall in her way. For the present she was very well off where she was; though the worship of the golden calf, as represented by Maude Hillary, was a perpetual abomination to her. But she was tolerably resigned to her present position at the Cedars. It was only in the future that her life looked dark and threatening. She must marry before Miss Hillary,--that was essential,--or else she must resign herself to the miserable position of a companion on sufferance, necessary to Maude, perhaps, but very disagreeable to Maude’s husband.
Under these circumstances, a chance visitor at the Cedars with thirty thousand a year for his fortune was not a person to be disdainfully entreated even by the daughter of all the Desmonds: so Julia was very kind to Francis Tredethlyn during that brief homeward drive, asked him all manner of questions respecting his sentiments upon things in general and the charity _fête_ in particular, and flashed her handsome eyes and white teeth upon him until he was almost dazzled by their brightness. Miss Desmond had very dark eyes--eyes that seemed of a greenish hazel when you saw them in repose, but which looked almost black when they sparkled athwart a fringe of dusky lashes. She had dark eyes and very white teeth; and the distinguishing characteristic of her face was the contrast between the darkness of one and the white glitter of the other. Mr. Tredethlyn knew that the young lady was very handsome, and that there was some condescension involved in her friendly notice of him; but his eyes wandered away to Maude’s fair face and earnest blue eyes, and there was a suspicion of irrelevance in some of his replies to Miss Desmond’s animated questions. If he had been less absent-minded, he might have seen that young lady’s white teeth close vengefully upon her lower lip as she turned from him after one of those doubtful answers.
The dinner at the Cedars went off very quietly. Mr. Hillary was silent, but hospitable, or at least as much so as a man can be in these days of Russian dinners and vicarious hospitality. Francis had lodged at a comfortable hotel in the regions of Covent Garden since his return from Cornwall, and had in no way altered his simple habits of life; so he was not a little puzzled by the array of glasses by the side of his plate, the lumps of ice which an obsequious attendant dropped ever and anon into his Moselle, the mysterious compounds in silver dishes which he discovered suddenly at his elbow whenever he was most abstracted by the novelty of the scene about him, and the vision of Maude Hillary, sitting on the other side of the round table in a cloud of white and blue. The dishes at that wonderful feast seemed so many culinary conundrums to Mr. Tredethlyn, and I fear that he made some very obvious mistakes in the management of the spoons and forks perpetually thrust upon him by the stealthy-footed retainers. But the dinner was over at last, and Captain Masters opened the dining-room door for the departure of the ladies, while poor Francis could only sit blankly staring like a countryman at a play. Lionel Hillary did not linger long over his wine; he had some papers to look at in his study, he said, and excused himself on that ground, as well as on account of that obstinate headache of his. The young men seemed very glad to be released from the atmosphere of hothouse flowers and pine-apple, faintly mingled with that odour of the bygone dinner which will hang round the most elegant dining-room, ventilate it as you will. Was not Maude Hillary in the drawing-room, whence already might be heard the sparkling ripple of arpeggio passages upon the piano? The two young loungers followed Mr. Hillary out into the hall, and Francis went with them, uncomfortably conscious of disadvantages not to be outbalanced by the possession of half a million or so in all manner of seven-per-cent-paying investments. The young soldier blacking his master’s boots had been the easiest-mannered of mankind; but Oliver Tredethlyn’s heir felt terribly embarrassed in Maude Hillary’s presence--only in her presence; he was not at all abashed by Miss Desmond’s eyes and teeth, though all their contrastive brightness was brought to bear upon him. Maude was at the piano, and Julia was bending over a stand of engravings. It may be that she had not very long fallen into that graceful attitude. When the three young men entered the room she looked up, and Mr. Tredethlyn meeting her friendly glance, and being considerably at a loss what to do with himself, went over to her, and found a comfortable haven in a low easy-chair near the couch on which she was sitting.
“Do you care much for Leech, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked, as she turned over the leaves of a portfolio reprinted from _Punch_.
The young man looked rather puzzled by this question.
“I don’t care much for them,” he answered, frankly. “I never had any but once, and that was in Van Diemen’s Land, when I had the fever,--fifteen of them on my temples, and that was no joke, you know, Miss Desmond.”
He was quite at his ease with Julia; but he would not for the world have been so confidential to Maude Hillary. Miss Desmond laughed good-naturedly.
“I don’t mean those horrible creatures that they put on one’s temples,” she exclaimed, “but Mr. John Leech, the caricaturist. You must have seen _Punch_, even in Van Diemen’s Land?”
“Oh, yes! my mas--superior officer used to get it from his mother every mail.”
He took the portfolio from Miss Desmond, and turned over the leaves: but he only stared absently at Mr. Leech’s most brilliant performances, and his eyes wandered away every now and then to the piano, where Maude Hillary was skimming through the gems of a new opera and dallying with her two adorers, deliciously unconscious of their adoration. Had she not inhabited an atmosphere of universal admiration and affection ever since she had exhibited her pink cheeks and infantile ringlets in company with the seven-shilling March peaches and five-guinea pine-apples, after her father’s pompous dinners, to be admired by ponderous old City magnates in the pauses of solemn discussions upon the rate of discount and the last grand crash on the Stock Exchange?
Julia Desmond, always observant--cursed, perhaps, with an especial faculty for penetrating all unpleasant secrets lying hidden under the many masks which society has invented for the convenience of mankind--Miss Desmond, I say, was not slow to perceive the Cornishman’s preoccupation, nor slow to credit Miss Hillary with another item in that heavy account so long standing between them.
“Even this country boor, with a great fortune of his own, must pay his meed of homage to the millionaire’s daughter,” thought Julia. “Is there some magical power in the possession of money which imparts a kind of fascination to the possessor?” Colonel Desmond’s daughter had felt some of the keenest stings of poverty, and it may be that she had grown to entertain an exaggerated estimation of that golden dross which is so paltry a thing when considered in a philosophical spirit. She looked at the young man sitting by her side; and as she looked, a mystic golden halo seemed to arise about him and surround him, until he appeared almost like an old picture of a saint, painted upon a shadowless background of gold. Thirty thousand a year! and he was young, handsome, manly, good-tempered-looking, or even something more than this; for there was a dash of nobility in his simple bearing which scarcely seemed to belong to the runaway son of a small farmer. The good old blood of the Tredethlyns, once squires and landowners of some degree, was not dishonoured by the young man who had blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots in Van Diemen’s Land. He was not a gentleman after the manner of the nineteenth century; he seemed rather like a stalwart soldier of the past, simple and daring, frank and generous. Julia, contemplating him always enframed in the golden halo, saw that, with the advantage of a clever woman’s training, he might be made a very presentable creature; in spite of that private-soldier story, which, after all, was spiced with a certain flavour of romance.
“People would say I married him for his money,” thought Miss Desmond; “but then they would say that if I married a provincial banker with fifteen hundred a year. Thirty thousand! thirty thousand a year!--and he is not a man who would act meanly in the matter of a settlement--and he could buy the Irish estate for a mere song--and he might call himself Tredethlyn Desmond.”
Maude Hillary’s companion and friend had employed herself for a very long time in the consideration of one grand subject--her own destiny. For a long time she had estimated every creature who came in her way by one unvarying gauge. Had he, or had he not, any bearing on that supreme question? If the answer were in the negative, Miss Desmond wasted no further thought upon the useless creature. But if she saw in the shadowy distance some possible combination of circumstances in which the individual might become a thread, however slightly interwoven, in the fabric of her destiny, Julia expended her brightest smiles and sweetest words for his gratification.
It was in no way strange, therefore, that the young lady who had given a good deal of attention to hare-brained young ensigns and penniless young curates with nothing better than remote expectations, should consider Mr. Tredethlyn worthy of her most serious deliberation. The present, however, was no time for thought,--for were not the young man’s eyes perpetually wandering towards the slender figure under the light of the moderator lamp? Miss Desmond felt there was no time to be lost. Already the rich man had made his election--already he had enrolled himself in the list of Maude Hillary’s victims. Another woman, perceiving the state of affairs, might have resigned herself to the loss of this grand chance of winning a rich husband; but Julia’s courage was not so easily dashed. It rose, rather, with the thought of contest. Had not her father been a grand old freebooter, boasting of kingly blood in his battered old body, and spilling it under the colours of every rebel army in modern Europe? The Desmond spirit rose in Julia’s breast as she saw Francis Tredethlyn’s wandering glances, half sheepish, half unconscious.
“I can set myself against her this time,” she thought; “and the battle between us will be a fair one. _This_ man cannot be a fortune-hunter. We meet on tolerably equal terms for once in a way, Miss Hillary, and let us see who will win.”
Julia’s dark eyes flashed their brightest as she looked across all the width of the room to the radiant-looking girl at the piano; and then she turned them suddenly upon Francis Tredethlyn, and began to talk to him. She began to talk to him, and, more than this, she made him listen to her. Miss Desmond was a brilliant talker. She possessed that wondrous faculty vulgarly called the gift of the gab,--the power of talking about everything and anything, or even about nothing, for the matter of that; the power of enchaining a listener in spite of himself, holding him prisoner when he had rather be away, and yet not detaining him an altogether unwilling prisoner;--the power of talking ignorantly, without seeming to be ignorant; speculating ideas and allusions at a venture, and never betraying the shallowness of their nature; assuming an interest in the most uninteresting subject, and never revealing the hollowness of the assumption,--a power, in short, which in its fascination seems like a modern form of those classic philtres which Roman maidens were wont to administer to eligible bachelors in the days when Rome was young. It may be said that Miss Desmond owed this faculty in some degree to her Hibernian ancestry; but no suspicion of their native accent vulgarized her discourse. Only a softer and richer depth in her low voice betrayed her Celtic origin.
Julia began to talk to Francis Tredethlyn, and, in spite of himself, he listened, and was fain to withdraw his gaze from the distant figure at the piano. She talked to him of a soldier’s life, jumping recklessly at conclusions, and taking it for granted that he must needs possess some latent spark of military ardour, which would blaze up into a flame under the fire of her enthusiasm. She talked to him of her father, and all those guerrilla warfares in which he had won distinction. She talked of Don Carlos, and Abd-el-Kader, and Garibaldi, whose name had not then the glorious significance which it carries with it to-day. She talked to him like a young Joan of Arc or an embryo maid of Saragosa;--and all that was brightest in Mr. Tredethlyn’s nature kindled beneath her influence. Had Francis been a stockbroker, Miss Desmond would have discoursed to him of Lionel Rothschild, or Lafitte, or Mirès; and she would have glowed with just the same enthusiasm, though her theme had been the Stock Exchange or the Bourse.
But in spite of himself Mr. Tredethlyn was pleased and interested. His boyish yearning for a military career had been very nearly trampled out of him during dreary years of marchings and counter-marchings, and sword-exercise, and barrack-tyranny, with never the glimpse of a battle-field, or so much as a brief skirmish with some chance enemy. But those fresh young feelings all came back to him when Julia discoursed in low eloquent accents of her father’s foreign experiences. “Ah, that was something like a military career!” thought the young man. “It was such a life that I hoped to lead when I ran away from Landresdale; and I thought I should come back a general, with a cocked-hat and a great plume of feathers, as the gardener’s son does in the play I saw once at Falmouth.”
And then Francis Tredethlyn, being by nature candid as a schoolboy newly come home for his holidays, opened his heart to Miss Desmond, and told her a good deal about his life. That dark chamber of his memory in which Susan’s image loomed through the sombre shadows he kept religiously sealed from every curious eye. But on all other subjects he was very communicative. He did not tell Julia that he had been Mr. Lowther’s body-servant; for there was something in that estate of servitude which had never been entirely pleasant to him, gallantly as he had borne himself under its serious ordeals. He had known poverty, he told Miss Desmond, in all its worst bitterness, and had seen his mother and father die broken-hearted, borne down by a load of petty debt and difficulty, when the loan of a couple of hundred pounds would have saved them.
“I felt altogether desperate one night, Miss Desmond,” he said, “when my poor mother was at her worst, and my father sitting in the kitchen as helpless as a child,--almost daft, as they say in the north. I felt desperate somehow, and I went out of the house and ran all the way to Tredethlyn Grange, and asked my uncle Oliver to lend me the money. He laughed in my face, Miss Desmond, and told me he hadn’t a five-pound note in the house; and I dare say he spoke the truth, for I think he’d have gone half crazy at the thought of a sovereign lying idle. I went back to the farm, and--my mother died the next day.”
He stopped, and sat for some minutes looking at Mr. Hillary’s Axminster carpet. Julia did not say anything. She was too perfect a tactician not to know that anything she could say must appear commonplace at such a moment. She only drew a long breath, a kind of fluttering sigh, expressive of the deepest sympathy.
“My mother died, Miss Desmond,” the young man went on; “and my father was not slow to follow her. So, having no one in the world to care for, except--except a cousin, who had been like a sister to me, I ran away to Falmouth, and enlisted in a foot regiment, thinking that I had but to pin a bunch of colours in my hat and march straight off to some field of battle. I left Cornwall, Miss Desmond; but I never forgot that night before my mother’s death. I’ve tried to feel grateful to my uncle Oliver for leaving me this fortune, but I can’t. I ought to feel grateful, I suppose; but I can’t. The memory of that night sours me, somehow. Money seems such paltry stuff, after all, when you think that all the golden coin in this world can’t bring back one human creature from the grave.”
“Ah, yes, indeed,” Miss Desmond murmured, in her tenderest voice.
And then, being blest with a very lively imagination, she found herself wondering whether, if wealth had been potent to restore the dead, and she had been possessed with wealth, she would have very much cared to awaken Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond from his quiet slumber in a little churchyard beside the winding Shannon. The old soldier of fortune was better in his grave perhaps, Julia thought, philosophically. She had begun to fight the battle of life on her own tactics, and had no very great opinion of her late father’s strategy.
“He was very clever,” she thought, with a tender remembrance of the Major’s best manœuvres; “but then one so often saw through him. He always started with wrong premises, and fancied everyone but himself was a fool: as if there could be any merit in deceiving only stupid people.” Miss Desmond was always wise enough to remember that the larger art of talking well comprehends the smaller art of listening gracefully. She was not one of those obnoxious people who talk for the sake of talking; and who, after rattling on without a full-stop for half an hour at a stretch, will stare vacantly at you while you recite to them some interesting adventure, evidently thinking of what they mean to say next, and waiting for the chance of cutting in. Julia Desmond talked with a purpose,--not because she wanted to talk, but because she wished to please: and now she listened to Francis Tredethlyn with an unfailing show of sympathy and interest, that beguiled him on to tell her more and more. She wound and insinuated herself into his confidence as a beautiful serpentine creature winds itself into the heart of an apparently impenetrable forest; and before the evening was finished Mr. Tredethlyn found himself almost as intimate with this splendid southern Irishwoman as if she had been his sister. She had set him completely at his ease; so that he no longer felt out of place in Mr. Hillary’s gorgeous rooms: and when the merchant, coming into the drawing-room at eleven o’clock, very pale and worn-looking, asked him to dine at the Cedars on the following Sunday, Francis unhesitatingly accepted the invitation. He stole just one glance at Maude as he did so; but she was in the act of exhibiting one of the newest accomplishments of a mouse-coloured Skye terrier for the edification of the two young loungers, and she was quite unconscious of that shy look from Mr. Tredethlyn’s eyes. He went to her presently to wish her good-night, and the spell of her gracious presence dazed and bewildered him, to the cost of the mouse-coloured terrier, upon whose silky paws he trampled in his embarrassment; and then, essaying to shake hands in a gentlemanly manner, he forgot what a stalwart giant he was, and squeezed the little hand that rested so lightly in his, until Maude’s fingers were wounded by the hoops, and clusters, and hearts, and crescents of diamonds and opals which twinkled and flashed upon them;--for Miss Hillary had seen the Marchioness of Londonderry’s famous rings, and never wore any vulgar mixture of many-coloured jewels upon her pretty white hands. Francis lingered a little after saying good-night, helpless under the spell of the enchantress, and then made his way somehow or other out of the room. Ah! surely uncle Oliver’s money was not such sordid dross, after all, when it was the golden key which admitted him to that paradise on the banks of the Thames.
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