Wyllard's Weird

"If you had heard him talk of our future, if you had seen him planning our home, you would hardly doubt that he meant to be happy with me, Lady Valeria," said Hilda.

"My child, I have seen your future home; I have heard what kind of a life Bothwell Grahame is to lead as your husband. He is to be a schoolmaster, cramming dull boys for impossible examinations; grinding mathematics and theoretical engineering all day long and every day, till his brain is weary; going over the same ground again and again like a horse in a mill. He is to be a nobody, a plodding bread-winner, living year after year in a God-forsaken village, far away from the great arena of life; ground down by the fathers and patronised by the mothers of his pupils. He is to cherish no higher ambition than to be able to pay the butcher and the baker, and to get himself a new coat before the old one is threadbare. That is the life to which your generous love would condemn him."

"We are not going to be quite such paupers as you imagine, Lady Valeria. I have a small income of my own, which will at least pay the baker; and I do not think Bothwell's rich cousin would see him in want of a coat."

"My dear Miss Heathcote, it is only a question of degree. Granted that Mr. Grahame is sure of his breakfast and dinner, his existence as a private tutor will be none the less a life of exile from all that makes life worth living – from the world of art and letters, from the strife and the glory of politics, from the great world of distinguished men and women. As my husband he would have the ball at his feet. His fortune would be large enough to command an opening in any career he might choose for himself, his connections on my side of the house would be powerful enough to help him, and his talents would undoubtedly bring him to the front. In the House his career would be assured. With his knowledge of India and Indian war tactics, he would inevitably make his mark. There are hardly three men in the House of Commons who have any real knowledge of that vast Eastern world for which English politicians legislate. You see I have dreamed for him, thought for him. All my ambition is for him, and not for myself."

"I am willing to believe that you love him, Lady Valeria," said Hilda, with frigid distinctness, looking her rival full in the face, "since nothing but the blindest love could induce any woman in your position to lower yourself as you have done – first in India as General Harborough's wife, and secondly to-day as General Harborough's widow – when you come to me and ask me to give up my betrothed husband, the man to whom I am to be married next Tuesday; for I suppose that is the gist of all you have said to me."

"I ask nothing from you, Miss Heathcote. I know the narrow view which most girls of your age, brought up as you have been, take of life and its obligations. I do not expect large-minded ideas from a young lady with your surroundings." This was said with infinite scorn of Hilda's rustic rearing. "But I think it well that you should know how much Bothwell Grahame surrenders for the privilege of having you for a wife. Of course it is quite possible that the recompense may be worth the sacrifice. It is for you to judge of that. I wish you good-day."

Hilda bowed and rang the bell, without a word. She did not accompany her visitor to the drawing-room door, but stood in a stony silence looking out at the window in front of her, with fixed eyes.

It was only when the outer door had closed on Lady Valeria that the girl flung herself on the nearest sofa and abandoned herself to her grief.

Alas, this entanglement of the past had been something more than a garland of roses. It had been a chain from which her lover had tried to release himself, but whose iron links yet hung about him.

All the happiness was gone out of her life, all the sweet tranquillity which had been the holiest charm in her love for Bothwell, the deep faith in her beloved, the assurance of his trustworthiness, his unalloyed love for her. How could she ever again believe in that love, after she had heard the history of his passion for another, after she had read of that wild infatuation in his own hand, after she had seen the woman he had thus loved and thus addressed – a woman to win and hold the love of men, a woman whose face had that subtle charm of supreme refinement and distinction which is far above the peach-bloom tints and perfect lines of stereotyped beauty? In Valeria the broken-hearted girl acknowledged a siren before whose fascinations the wisest man might be as a fool. She compared herself with her rival. She walked across the room and stood before the long console-glass, contemplating her own image, half-scornfully, half-sorrowfully. The pale tear-blotted face appeared at its worst, robbed of the freshness that constituted half its beauty. The slight and girlish figure looked insignificant as compared with Valeria's statelier bearing.

The girl turned herself about, and looked at herself at every angle, as if she had been trying on a gown at her milliner's.

"What a dowdy I am!" she said to herself. "Just the very pattern for a schoolmaster's wife. I doubt if Lady Valeria is more than an inch taller; and yet she looks a queen. It is the way she carries her head, I suppose, and the way she walks, like a woman accustomed to command. Yes, a man might well be proud of such a wife, and of the position such a wife could give him. Bothwell in Parliament. Bothwell a great authority on Indian affairs. How strange it sounds! But I know how clever he is, how well he can talk upon any subject. It would be a splendid career for him. And for my sake he is to forego all that, and to drudge as a tutor in a Cornish village. Yes, I suppose it would be a dreary life for such a man – though it seemed so full of brightness when we two talked about it last week. For my sake. No, Bothwell," she said to herself resolutely, striking her clenched hand upon the marble table. "No, Bothwell, not for my sake! You shall not surrender fame and fortune for my sake!"

And then, seating herself on the old-fashioned window-seat, with clasped hands lying in her lap, and steadfast eyes brooding on the ground; in an attitude of deepest thought, she retraced the history of Bothwell's courtship. She asked herself if she had verily been, as Lady Valeria had insinuated, herself half the wooer. She remembered how, in the beginning of their acquaintance, she had admired Dora Wyllard's cousin – how his riding, his singing, his conversation had alike seemed perfection. How she had contrasted him, to his wondrous advantage, with the country squires around and about. It was just possible that in her girlish inexperience she had betrayed her admiration, had flattered Bothwell into the idea that he liked her. And then, when the hour of trouble came, it was true that she had made no effort to hide her feelings; she had given Bothwell her sympathy almost unasked; she had, perhaps, lured him into declaring himself as her lover, when the feeling which inspired him was but the impulse of the moment, a transient emotion, born of gratitude.

She could understand how, in his self-contempt, his wounded honour, he had believed that his love for Valeria was a thing of the past, and had been glad to release himself from the ignoble bondage. But now that Valeria was free, his first love, fondly attached to him, valuing her fortune and position only as a means for his advancement, who could doubt that the old love would revive in his breast with all the old fervour; that his heart would go back to his first beloved, as a bird returns to its nest?

And was his whole life to be sacrificed because of this one mistaken impulse? No, the wrong was not yet irreparable. The marriage planned for next Tuesday need never take place.

Hilda began deliberately to scheme out the manner in which she should set her lover free. If the thing was to be done, it must be done bravely and thoroughly – not by halves. There must be no half-hearted action, no wavering, no pretence of surrender offered in the hope that Bothwell would refuse to accept his liberty. No; she must make the sacrifice as full and as effectual as that of Jephthah's daughter. She gave her life to save her father's honour. She (Hilda) could give her happiness, her fair future, the sweet ideal she had dreamed of, the life which to every good woman seems of all lives most perfect, an existence spent in tranquil seclusion with the husband of her choice.

After long brooding, deepest thought interrupted ever and anon by a burst of passionate weeping, tears which would not be restrained, Hilda had made her plan. She would go away, quite away, where Bothwell could not follow her. She would write him a letter which would leave him free to return to his old allegiance, while she herself would disappear, drop quietly out of the circle in which she was known, and remain hidden from all her friends for the next few months, perhaps for a year: at any rate until the joy-bells had rung for Bothwell's marriage with his old love. Alas, those joy-bells! She had imagined them ringing for her own wedding; she had heard their sweet music in her dreams.

Where should she go? What should she do with herself during the time of hiding? That was the question; and it was a difficult one for this inexperienced girl to answer. She had travelled so little, that all the wide world outside her own home was no more familiar to her than a chapter of geography. She knew the names of mountains and rivers, she had made her dream-pictures of beautiful places and scenes in far-away lands; but of railways and steamers, of the mode and manner of journeying from one place to another, of hotels and custom-houses, and the exchange of money, she knew hardly anything.

"I must go very far away, to some place where he would not think of following me, where he could never find me," she said to herself, supposing that it would be a point of honour with Bothwell to follow her, to keep his plighted troth, if it were possible.

She wanted to set him free, to make it easy for him to go back to his old love. She told herself that Lady Valeria had spoken the truth, and that it was not possible for him to have forgotten that old love.

When he had married Valeria, she, Hilda, would be free to come back to her home, to take up the thread of her broken life and follow it on to the dreary end. What joy could she have in her life, having lost him? Only the joy of knowing that she had loved him better than herself, cared more for his happiness than her own – the joy of woman's martyrdom.

After long deliberation, after having thought of a trip to Canada or a voyage to Australia, after having meditated upon various possible and impossible journeys, she decided upon a very commonplace course of proceeding. She had often heard it remarked of a levanting criminal that if he had stayed in London or any populous city, he would in all probability have escaped his pursuers; he would have been lost in the press of humanity, like a bubble in a running stream; whereas the man who goes to America is almost inevitably traced and trapped.

She would not go to London, a city she hated, and where she might at any moment run against her Cornish friends, all of whom paid occasional visits to the metropolis. She would go to Paris, where she would be lost among strangers; where she could live quietly in some obscure quarter, improving herself as a singer and a pianiste, until her time of probation was over, and the announcement of Bothwell's marriage told her that her sacrifice had been consummated. She would so plan her life that her brother could know that she was well and well cared for; but even he should not know the place of her residence, lest he should betray her secret to Bothwell.

This idea of Paris was partly traceable to an old influence. Until a year ago she had taken lessons from a bright little Frenchwoman who had taught her music and singing, and who had helped her incidentally with her French. The lessons had been going on for three years, when Hilda was pronounced to have finished her musical education, or at least to have learnt as much as Mademoiselle Duprez could teach her, and in those three years the little Frenchwoman had been a weekly visitor at The Spaniards, coming all the way from Plymouth to give her lesson, and being driven back to the station by her pupil, after a cheery luncheon, which the little woman thoroughly enjoyed.

Mademoiselle Duprez claimed kindred with the famous French tenor of that name, and had herself been a small celebrity in her way. She had sung at the Opera House in the Rue Lepelletier, in the days when Falcon was Diva, and Halevy's Juive was the success of the hour. Then came a fatal fever, caught at Nice, where she had gone to fulfil an autumnal engagement. Louise Duprez lost the voice which had been her only fortune. Happily, though the voice was gone, the exquisite method learned from Garcia, and ripened at the feet of Rossini, still remained; and by her excellence as a teacher of singing and piano, Mademoiselle Duprez had contrived to make a comfortable living, first in Paris, and afterwards at Plymouth, whither she had come at the suggestion of Edward Heathcote, who had made her acquaintance at the house of one of his Parisian friends, and who had recommended her to try a residence in Devonshire as a cure for her delicate chest, promising at the same time to do all in his power to help her in finding pupils at Plymouth, where he was at that time Town Clerk.

Mademoiselle Duprez had followed Mr. Heathcote's advice, and had not waited long before she found herself fairly established in the Devonshire sea-port. Hilda had been her first pupil, and Hilda she loved almost as a maiden aunt loves the prettiest and most amiable of her nieces. It was Hilda she quoted to all her other pupils. "You should hear a dear young friend of mine, Miss Heathcote of Bodmin, sing that song," she would say; and an eloquent shrug of her shoulders and elevation of her eyebrows would express how wide the difference between Miss Heathcote's perfection and the shortcoming of the performer then in hand.

Hilda was very fond of the lively little Parisienne: loved to hear her talk, and to learn of her; hung upon her words as she expounded the delicacies of her native language. Hilda had petted and made much of the little woman whenever she came to The Spaniards; had never spent a day in Plymouth without paying her old mistress a visit. And now in her sorrow and difficulty it was of Louise Duprez she thought, as the one friend whom she could trust with her secret, and who would be able to help her.

Hilda went to her own room before Fräulein Meyerstein returned from her afternoon walk with the twins. Those well-brought-up infants were ruthlessly sent from their playroom, their rocking-horse, and their doll's house, an hour after their early dinner, and were taken for afternoon drill by the Fräulein. Needless to say that they detested the formal trudge along dusty lanes, and abhorred the beauties of Nature encountered on the way; but their health no doubt profited by this severe regimen.

Hilda shut herself in her own rooms for the rest of the evening; with the usual plea of a headache. But she was up before daybreak next morning, and by six o'clock she had packed a small portmanteau and a Gladstone bag with her own hands, and carried them down surreptitiously to the stable-yard, where she gave them to an underling, with directions to put them in the pony-cart, and take them to Bodmin Road station in time for the eight-o'clock train. She herself intended to walk to the station, as her appearance on foot would be less likely to attract attention than in the pony-cart with the luggage.

So in the dewy morning, alone and unattended, with ashen cheeks and eyelids swollen by long weeping, Hilda Heathcote crept out of her brother's house, and walked across the hills, trusting to the keen breath of the autumn wind to obliterate the traces of a night of anguish before she arrived at the station.

She had written a long letter to Bothwell. This she carried with her, to post in Plymouth; and she had left letters for her brother and for the Fräulein. No one need be made uneasy at her disappearance.

CHAPTER III.

AN ELOPEMENT ON NEW LINES

Mdlle. Duprez occupied a first floor in an airy terrace of houses overlooking the Hoe. She was the kind of little woman to whom eating and drinking and fine dress are matters of very small moment, but who could not have endured to live in a shabby house or an ugly neighbourhood. All her surroundings were neat and bright and fair to look upon. She had brought over her furniture from Paris. It was the remnant of that furniture which had adorned her great-grandmother's house at Versailles, before the fiery spirits of the tiers état met in the tennis-court, and the Revolution began. There was not much of it left, but that little was of the best period in French cabinet-work, and in the most perfect taste.

Louise Duprez loved this heritage from her ancestors as if the chairs and sofa, cabinet and writing-table, had been living things. She used to sit and contemplate them sometimes, between the lights, in a dreamy mood, and think how much they might have told her about Marie Antoinette and her court, and the old days of the Oeil de Boeuf, if they could but have found a voice. The bonheur du jour, with-its ormolu mounts, looked very human as the firelight shone upon it. The goats' heads seemed to wink and twinkle like human eyes, while the floral mouldings assumed the form of a broad human grin, as who should say, "Ah, I could tell you some fine farces about those ladies, if I could but speak!"

Mademoiselle's rooms were always the pink of neatness; not a book out of line on the shelves above the secrétaire, not a scrap of work or a stray pin-cushion littering the tables; newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, all in their places; while Mademoiselle herself was one of those dainty little women who never have a pin awry in their toilet.

So when Miss Heathcote was ushered into the singing-mistress's salon at half-past nine in the morning, her unexpected appearance at such an early hour caused neither confusion nor annoyance.

Mademoiselle had been breakfasting at a table in front of the open window – a temperate meal of coffee and roll, neatly arranged on a tray. Spotless damask and pretty china made the tray a picture, with Mademoiselle's pink cambric gown and bright little face for background.

"My dear child, how early! I am enchanted to see you!" she cried, jumping up and kissing her old pupil on both cheeks. "What a good girl to come to me before my day's work begins! This is one of my full days, from eleven till five. Squall, squall, thump, thump, every kind of outrage upon the genius of harmony must these poor ears of mine suffer; and I must be very polite, all the same; must not lose patience and cry aloud – ah, how I long to do it sometimes! – 'My love, you have no more voice than a peacock, no more ear than a four-post bedstead; your accent is diabolical, and you are the very embodiment of idiotcy.' You see one must not be quite frank with one's pupils. But, Hilda, my pet, what is the matter? You have been crying!"

"Not since last night, Mademoiselle," answered Hilda, looking at her friend with hard, dry eyes; "I cried so much last night that I don't think I shall ever shed a tear again. There must be an end, you know, even to tears."

"My sweetest child, what in Heaven's name has happened? Your brother, Mr. Effecotte!"

Louise Duprez gasped as she spoke the name. Edward Heathcote was her benefactor, that one Englishman whom she admired and honoured with all her heart and mind, whom she thought almost equal to the typical Frenchman, the French gentleman of a régime that is almost forgotten, of a day that is dead.

"My brother is quite well, at least as far as I know," answered Hilda, with sisterly indifference; and then she made Mdlle. Duprez sit down, and knelt at her feet, clasping her hands, and looking up at her earnestly. "My dear, kind friend, I want you to help me in a crisis of my life," she said.

"To help you to run away with Mr. Grahame, I suppose. No, no, Hilda, pas si bête; I am your brother's friend above all things. If Mr. Effecotte disapproves of your marriage, I will do nothing to further it."

"Pray don't be in such a hurry," said Hilda. "Hear my trouble first, and then help me to lighten it, if you can. I think you ought to know that I am not the kind of girl to make a runaway marriage."

"Indeed, I know nothing of the kind about any English girl. Runaway marriages seem as common in this country as runaway knocks at my door."

"Englishwomen run away before marriage, and Frenchwomen after," retorted Hilda.

"I don't think your English matrons such irreproachable creatures," said the Parisienne. "There is your Lady Valeria Harborough, for instance, who had one of the best husbands in Christendom, and yet was always surrounded by a bevy of admirers, and made herself more talked about than any woman in Plymouth."

"Was she really talked about?" asked Hilda eagerly.

"Really, really. I don't mean to say that she was supposed to be actually incorrect in her conduct; but she brought her Indian manners back to England with her, and she had always her court of fools and fops about her. And now the papers are beginning to be impertinent about her – or, at least, this stupid little paper, which models itself on some of the London society papers."

Mdlle. Duprez pointed to a periodical on the table at her side – a sheet of eight pages, printed on pink paper, and calling itself the Plymouth Censor. Hilda snatched it up, and ran her eye rapidly along the paragraphs, till she came to one worded thus:

"Rumours are already afloat in privileged circles as to the probabilities of a second hymen for the beautiful widow of a general officer, lately gone over to the majority. Foremost in the betting stands a certain ci-devant captain of Engineers, who saved the General's life by a dexterous shot in the jungle, and who has been du dernier bien with the General's charming wife ever since. Ours is an age of rehabilitations."

"Lady Valeria was right," murmured Hilda. "People know all about her folly. Her only redemption will be her marriage with Bothwell."

And then she opened her heart to her old friend – told her everything that had passed between herself and Lady Valeria – told her how she had made up her mind to sacrifice her own happiness rather than to let Bothwell's life be spoiled by a mistaken engagement. At first Mdlle. Duprez ridiculed her plan as Quixotic to absurdity, and refused to have anything to do with it. But the girl's indomitable resolution, her intense earnestness of purpose, prevailed at last over the Frenchwoman's scruples. Louise Duprez, at four-and-forty years of age, was as romantic as the simplest schoolgirl. She had spent the last fifteen years of her life almost entirely among girls. She had been the confidante of their love-affairs, their fond dreams of the ideal; she had counselled and lectured them, had sympathised and sorrowed and joyed with them. And now she was quite ready to be impressed by the heroic element in Hilda's intended sacrifice. The happiness of one young life given away to secure the fame and fortune of another and dearer life. It was a romantic scheme which kindled all Louise Duprez's warmest fancies.

"Would I were young again, to do such a thing myself for my beloved!" she thought to herself, with a tender sigh for her only lover, who had perished, a burly major of Artillery, on the bloody field of Sedan.

"How shall I ever answer to your brother – my best of friends – if I assist you in rebellion against him?" asked Mdlle. Duprez, after a thoughtful silence.

"I am not rebelling against my brother. I am only leaving my home in order to break an engagement which Edward always disapproved. He gave his consent reluctantly at the last, to please Mrs. Wyllard. He will be very glad to hear that the engagement is cancelled."

"But you have no right to conceal your whereabouts from him."

"The concealment need not last long – only till Bothwell has gone back to his old love; and that I should think will be very soon," with a stifled sob. "There is no use in your being unkind to me. If I do not find a home in France with your aid, I shall find it without you. I have made up my mind to go on to Southampton by the midday train, and to cross to Havre to-night. The steamer leaves Southampton at ten o'clock. There will be plenty of time for me to get there."