Only a clod

THE MASTER.

Ensign Harcourt Lowther, of her Majesty’s 51st Light Infantry, sat staring out into his garden at Port Arthur, watching a couple of convict gardeners--who were going about their work with a monotonous and exasperating deliberation of movement--and lamenting the evil fortune that had stationed him in his present quarters. He had a great many troubles, this elegant young ensign, who was, for the time being, destined to bloom unseen, and waste the graces that ought to have adorned Belgravia upon the desert air of the island of Tasmania. He had, as he himself elegantly expressed it, no end of troubles. First and foremost, his cigar would not draw; and as it was the last of a case of choice cabanas, the calamity was not a small one. Secondly, there had been a drought in fair Van Diemen’s Land for the last month or so. The verdure was growing brown and leathery; the feathery masses of the tall fern shrivelled at the edges like scorched paper; the stiff foliage of the cedars seemed to rattle as it shook in the dry, dust-laden wind, and the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade; true, it might drop forty degrees or so at any moment, with the uprising of a moist breeze from the sea, but, pending the arrival of that auspicious moment, Mr Lowther was in a very bad temper. What had he done that he should be stationed in a convict settlement, with no chance of any gain or glory as compensation for his trials; with no one to speak to except a prosy old police-magistrate or a puritanical chaplain; with nothing better to look at than the eternal blue of the ocean, or a whaling vessel anchored in the bay; with nothing to listen to except the clanking of hammers and banging of timber and jingling of iron in the busy dockyard; with no better enjoyment to hope for than a couple of days’ quail-shooting or kangaroo-hunting in the interior?

“If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher, I couldn’t be much worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?”

This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room.

“Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice--the whistler had broken off in the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of Erin dwells,”--“yes, captain, quite ready.”

“That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,--“the fellow will call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.”

“But you see you are captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler, emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and any amount of convicts to look after.”

“If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the vieille roche, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his companion--a cheerful bourgeois, who pretended to make light of his situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets something.”

“That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign Harcourt Lowther.

If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world. But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear--the companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual discontent.

But Frank Tredethlyn bore it all cheerfully; with a manly, open-hearted cheerfulness that had no taint of sycophancy. If the young ensign wanted to talk to him, well and good--he was ready and willing to talk about any thing or every thing; but he had his own sentiments upon most subjects, which sentiments were of a very fast colour, and did not take any reflected hue from Mr. Lowther’s aristocratic opinions.

It is not to be supposed that Francis Tredethlyn, private soldier and valet, had any claims to intellectual equality with his master. The private wrote a fair commercial hand, very bold and big and resolute-looking; could read aloud without stumbling ignominiously over the long words; could cast up accounts; and, looking back at the history of the universal past, saw glimmering faintly over a sea of darkness and oblivion such beacon-lights as a Norman invasion; a solemn meeting on the flat turf of Runnymede; a Reformation, with a good deal of martyr-burning and head-chopping attendant thereupon; a fiery hook-nosed Dutch liberator, a Jacobite rebellion, and a Reform Bill. Beyond these limits the attainments of Mr. Tredethlyn did not extend; and the ensign, when grumbling at the general discomfort of his life, was apt to say that it was a hard thing to be flung for companionship on a fellow who was nothing but a boor and a clod.

Mr. Lowther treated his valet very much as a spoiled child treats her doll; sometimes it pleased him to be monstrously cordial and familiar with his attendant, while at another time he held Francis aloof by a haughty reserve of manner, beyond which barrier the other made no effort to penetrate.

“The fellow does possess that merit,” Harcourt Lowther said sometimes, “he knows how to keep his place.”

The fact of the matter is, the valet was infinitely less dependent upon his master’s companionship than his master upon his. There were a hundred ways in which Francis Tredethlyn could amuse himself; and there was not a cloud in the sky, a wave of the sea, a leaf in the garden, out of which he could not take some scrap of pleasure, and which had not a deeper and truer meaning for him than for the idle young officer who lay yawning upon his narrow couch with his feet in the air, and nothing better to do than to admire the shape of his boots, obtained on credit from a confiding West-end tradesman. Francis had that wide sympathy with his fellow-creatures which is a special attribute of some men; and was on the friendliest possible terms with the two convict gardeners, both of whom had achieved some renown as the most incorrigible and execrable specimens of the criminal class. Every dog in the little settlement fawned upon Frank Tredethlyn, and ran to rub his head against his knees, and slaver his hand with its flapping tongue. He had made a kennel for two or three of these canine acquaintances in a shady corner of the big garden, much to the disgust and annoyance of the ensign, who only cared for such dogs as are calculated to assist the sports of their lord and master. Staghounds and beagles, foxhounds and terriers, setters, pointers, and retrievers, clever ratting Scotch terriers, well-bred and savage bulls, even little short-eared toy terriers, or fawn-coloured and black-muzzled pugs, were all very well placed in the scheme of creation: but Mr. Lowther could find no explanation for the existence of those mongrel creatures who seem to have nothing to do in the world but to attach themselves with slavish devotion to some brutal master, or to lie in the most disreputable courts and alleys of a city in hot weather and catch flies.

But, somehow or other, Francis Tredethlyn seemed generally to do pretty much as he liked, in spite of military despotism and Mr. Harcourt Lowther. The dogs were unmolested in their shady corner; and the ensign was so good as to say that a little aviary of wicker-work and wire, which Tredethlyn constructed in his leisure hours, and duly filled with tiny feathered inhabitants, that kept up a faint twittering in the sunshine, was an improvement to the cottage. Francis was very handy, and could do wonders with a hammer and a handful of tin tacks; and was, indeed, altogether a great acquisition to his master, as Mr. Corbett, the police-magistrate, sometimes remarked to Harcourt Lowther.

“Yes,” Harcourt answered, indifferently, “the fellow is a cut above most of his class. He is a Cornishman, it seems, and the son of a small farmer in that land of Tre, Pol, and Pen; and he tells me that he has an old miser uncle who is supposed to be preternaturally rich. Egad! I wish I had such an uncle! All my uncles are misers for the matter of that; but then, unluckily, the poor devils are misers because they’re preternaturally poor.”

Mr. Lowther stood before the little looking-glass, in the sunny window, admiring himself, while Francis Tredethlyn helped him on with his coat. He was going to dine with Mr. Corbett the magistrate, and to spend the evening in the society of Miss Corbett, who had come out to the colony with the idea that general officers and wealthy judges would be waiting on the shore ready to conduct her from the place of debarcation to the hymeneal altar, and had been a little soured by the disenchantment which had too surely followed her arrival. She was a gushing damsel of thirty-five, very tall and square, and of a prevailing drab colour; and she played tremendous variations of shrill Scottish melodies on a piano which had been warranted to preserve its purity of tone in any climate, but upon which the nearest thing to an harmonious octave was a wild stretch of thirteen notes. Mr. Lowther must have been very low in the world when he had nothing better to do than to sit by Miss Corbett’s piano while she banged and rattled at the numerous disguises under which “Kinloch of Kinloch” appeared in a fantasia of twelve pages, now prancing jauntily in triplets, now rushing up and down the piano in chromatic scales, now scampering wildly in double arpeggios, now banging himself out of all knowledge in common chords, or wailing dismally in a hideous minor. Fate had done its worst for Ensign Lowther, when he had no better amusement than to lounge by the side of that ill-used old instrument, staring reflectively at the thin places on the top of Miss Corbett’s drab-coloured head.

Harcourt Lowther stood before the glass admiring his handsome face, while his valet brushed the collar of his coat. Well, he had a right to admire himself! If Providence had treated him badly, capricious Mother Nature, who, like any other frivolous-minded parent, elects her prime favourites without rhyme or reason, had been very bountiful to him in the matter of an aquiline nose, a finely-modelled mouth and chin, and deep womanish blue eyes, with a shimmer of gold on their lashes. No one could deny Mr. Lowther’s claim to be considered a remarkably handsome man, an elegant young man, a very agreeable and accomplished gentleman. The world, of course, had nothing to do with that rougher edge of the ensign’s character which he turned to his valet Francis Tredethlyn in his cottage at Port Arthur.