"Let her have her youth again—Let her be as she was then!Let her have her proud dark eyes,And her petulant, quick replies:Let her sweep her dazzling hand,With its gesture of command,And shake back her raven hairWith the old imperious air.
"Let her have her youth again—Let her be as she was then!Let her have her proud dark eyes,And her petulant, quick replies:Let her sweep her dazzling hand,With its gesture of command,And shake back her raven hairWith the old imperious air.
I have an idea that the Hibernian Iseult must have been a tartar, though Matthew Arnold glosses over her peccadilloes so pleasantly. I wonder whether she had a strong brogue, and a sneaking fondness for usquebaugh."
"Please, don't make a joke of her," pleaded Christabel; "she is very real to me. I see her as a lovely lady—tall and royal-looking, dressed in long robes of flowered silk, fringed with gold. And Tristan——"
"What of Tristan? Is his image as clear in your mind? How do you depict the doomed knight, born to suffer and to sin, destined to sorrow from the time of his forest-birth—motherless, beset with enemies, consumed by hopeless passion. I hope you feel sorry for Tristan?"
"Who could help being sorry for him?"
"Albeit he was a sinner? I assure you, in the old romance which you have not read—which you would hardly care to read—neither Tristan nor Iseult are spotless."
"I have never thought of their wrong-doing. Their fate was so sad, and they loved each other so truly."
"And, again, you can believe, perhaps—you who are so innocent and confiding—that a man who has sinned may forsake the old evil ways and lead a good life, until every stain of that bygone sin is purified. You can believe, as the Greeks believed, in atonement and purification."
"I believe, as I hope all Christians do, that repentance can wash away sin."
"Even the accusing memory of wrong-doing, and make a man's soul white and fair again? That is a beautiful creed."
"I think the Gospel gives us warrant for believing as much—not as some of the Dissenters teach, that one effort of faith, an hour of prayer and ejaculation, can transform a murderer into a saint; but that earnest, sustained regret for wrong-doing, and a steady determination to live a better life——"
"Yes—that is real repentance," exclaimed Angus, interrupting her. "Common sense, even without Gospel light, tells one that it must be good. Christabel—may I call you Christabel?—just for this one isolated half-hour of life—here in Pentargon Bay? You shall be Miss Courtenay directly we leave this spot."
"Call me what you please. I don't think it matters very much," faltered Christabel, blushing deeply.
"But it makes all the difference to me. Christabel, I can't tell you how sweet it is to me just to pronounce your name. If—if—I could call you by that name always, or by a name still nearer and dearer. But you must judge. Give me half-an-hour—half-an-hour of heartfelt earnest truth on my side, and pitying patience on yours. Christabel, my past life has not been what a stainless Christian would call a good life. I have not been so bad as Tristan. I have violated no sacred charge—betrayed no kinsman. I suppose I have been hardly worse than the common run of young men, who have the means of leading an utterly useless life. I have lived selfishly, unthinkingly—caring for my own pleasure—with little thought of anything that was to come afterwards, either on earth or in heaven. But all that is past and done with. My wild oats are sown; I have had enough of youth and folly. When I came to Cornwall the other day I thought that I was on the threshold of middle age, and that middle age could give me nothing but a few years of pain and weariness. But—behold a miracle!—you have given me back my youth—youth and hope, and a desire for length of days, and a passionate yearning to lead a new, bright, stainless life. You have done all this, Christabel. I love you as I never thought it possible to love! I believe in you as I never before believed in woman—and yet—and yet——"
He paused, with a long heartbroken sigh, clasped the girl's hand, which had been straying idly among the faded heather, and pressed it to his lips.
"And yet I dare not ask you to be my wife. Shall I tell you why?"
"Yes, tell me," she faltered, her cheeks deadly pale, her lowered eyelids heavy with tears.
"I told you I was like Achilles, doomed to an early death. You remember with what pathetic tenderness Thetis speaks of her son,
'Few years are thine, and not a lengthened term;At once to early death and sorrows doomedBeyond the lot of man!'
'Few years are thine, and not a lengthened term;At once to early death and sorrows doomedBeyond the lot of man!'
The Fates have spoken about me quite as plainly as ever the sea-nymph foretold the doom of her son. He was given the choice of length of days or glory, and he deemed fame better than long life. But my life has been as inglorious as it must be brief. Three months ago, one of the wisest of physicians pronounced my doom. The hereditary malady which for the last fifty years has been the curse of my family shows itself by the clearest indications in my case. I could have told the doctor this just as well as he told me; but it is best to have official information. I may die before I am a year older; I may crawl on for the next ten years—a fragile hot-house plant, sent to winter under southern skies."
"And you may recover, and be strong and well again!" cried Christabel, in a voice choked with sobs. She made no pretence of hiding her pity or her love. "Who can tell? God is so good. What prayer will He not grant us if we only believe in Him? Faith will remove mountains."
"I have never seen it done," said Angus. "I'm afraid that no effort of faith in this degenerate age will give a man a new lung. No, Christabel, there is no chance of long life for me. If hope—if love could give length of days, my new hopes, born of you—my new love felt for you, might work that miracle. But I am the child of my century: I only believe in the possible. And knowing that my years are so few, and that during that poor remnant of life I may be a chronic invalid, how can I—how dare I be so selfish as to ask any girl—young, fresh, and bright, with all the joys of life untasted—to be the companion of my decline? The better she loved me, the sadder would be her life—the keener would be the anguish of watching my decay!"
"But it would be a life spent with you, her days would be devoted to you; if she really loved you, she would not hesitate," pursued Christabel, her hands clasped passionately, tears streaming down her pale cheeks, for this moment to her was the supreme crisis of fate. "She would be unhappy, but there would be sweetness even in her sorrow if she could believe that she was a comfort to you!"
"Christabel, don't tempt me! Ah, my darling! you don't know how selfish a man's love is, how sweet it would be to me to snatch such bliss, even on the brink of the dark gulf—on the threshold of the eternal night, the eternal silence! Consider what you would take upon yourself—you who perhaps have never known what sickness means—have never seen the horrors of mortal disease."
"Yes, I have sat with some of our poor people when they were dying. I have seen how painful disease is, how cruel Nature seems, and how hard it is for a poor creature racked with pain to believe in God's beneficence; but even then there has been comfort in being able to help them and cheer them a little. I have thought more of that than of the actual misery of the scene."
"But to give all your young life—all your days and thoughts and hopes to a doomed man! Think of that, Christabel! When you are happy with him to see Death grinning behind his shoulder—to watch that spectacle which is of all Nature's miseries the most awful—the slow decay of human life—a man dying by inches—not death, but dissolution! If my malady were heart-disease, and you knew that at some moment—undreamt of—unlooked for—death would come, swift as an arrow from Hecate's bow, brief, with no loathsome or revolting detail—then I might say, 'Let us spend my remnant of life together.' But consumption, you cannot tell what a painful ending that is! Poets and novelists have described it as a kind of euthanasia; but the poetical mind is rarely strong in scientific knowledge. I want you to understand all the horror of a life spent with a chronic sufferer, about whom the cleverest physician in London has made up his mind."
"Answer me one question," said Christabel, drying her tears, and trying to steady her voice. "Would your life be any happier if we were together—till the end?"
"Happier? It would be a life spent in Paradise. Pain and sickness could hardly touch me with their sting."
"Then let me be your wife."
"Christabel, are you in earnest? have you considered?"
"I consider nothing, except that it may be in my power to make your life a little happier than it would be without me. I want only to be sure of that. If the doom were more dreadful than it is—if there were but a few short months of life left for you, I would ask you to let me share them; I would ask to nurse you and watch you in sickness. There would be no other fate on earth so full of sweetness for me. Yes, even with death and everlasting mourning waiting for me at the end."
"My Christabel, my beloved! my angel, my comforter! I begin to believe in miracles. I almost feel as if you could give me length of years, as well as bliss beyond all thought or hope of mine. Christabel, Christabel, God forgive me if I am asking you to wed sorrow; but you have made this hour of my life an unspeakable ecstasy. Yet I will not take you quite at your word, love. You shall have time to consider what you are going to do—time to talk to your aunt."
"I want no time for consideration. I will be guided by no one. I think God meant me to love you—and cure you."
"I will believe anything you say; yes, even if you promise me a new lung. God bless you, my beloved! You belong to those whom He does everlastingly bless, who are so angelic upon this earth that they teach us to believe in heaven. My Christabel, my own! I promised to call you Miss Courtenay when we left Pentargon, but I suppose now you are to be Christabel for the rest of my life!"
"Yes, always."
"And all this time we have not seen a single seal," exclaimed Angus, gaily.
His delicate features were radiant with happiness. Who could at such a moment remember death and doom? All painful words which need be said had been spoken.
Mrs. Tregonell and her niece were alone together in the library half-an-hour before afternoon tea, when the autumn light was just beginning to fade, and the autumn mist to rise ghostlike from the narrow little harbour of Boscastle. Miss Bridgeman had contrived that it should be so, just as she had contrived the visit to the seals that morning.
So Christabel, kneeling by her aunt's chair in the fire-glow, just as she had knelt upon the night before Mr. Hamleigh's coming, with faltering lips confessed her secret.
"My dearest, I have known it for ever so long," answered Mrs. Tregonell, gravely, laying her slender hand, sparkling with hereditary rings—never so gorgeous as the gems bought yesterday—on the girl's sunny hair. "I cannot say that I am glad. No, Christabel, I am selfish enough to be sorry, for Leonard's sake, that this should have happened. It was the dream of my life that you two should marry."
"Dear aunt, we could never have cared for each other—as lovers. We had been too much like brother and sister."
"Not too much for Leonard to love you, as I know he does. He was too confident—too secure of his power to win you. And I, his mother, have brought a rival here—a rival who has stolen your love from my son."
"Don't speak of him bitterly, dearest. Remember he is the son of the man you loved."
"But not my son! Leonard must always be first in my mind. I like Angus Hamleigh. He is all that his father was—yes—it is almost a painful likeness—painful to me, who loved and mourned his father. But I cannot help being sorry for Leonard."
"Leonard shall be my dear brother, always," said Christabel; yet even while she spoke it occurred to her that Leonard was not quite the kind of person to accept the fraternal position pleasantly, or, indeed, any secondary character whatever in the drama of life.
"And when are you to be married?" asked Mrs. Tregonell, looking at the fire.
"Oh, Auntie, do you suppose I have begun to think of that yet awhile?"
"Be sure that he has, if you have not! I hope he is not going to be in a hurry. You were only nineteen last birthday."
"I feel tremendously old," said Christabel. "We—we were talking a little about the future, this afternoon, in the billiard-room, and Angus talked about the wedding being at the beginning of the new year. But I told him I was sure you would not like that."
"No, indeed! I must have time to get reconciled to my loss," answered the dowager, with her arm drawn caressingly round Christabel's head, as the girl leaned against her aunt's chair. "What will this house seem to me without my daughter? Leonard far away, putting his life in peril for some foolish sport, and you living—Heaven knows where; for you would have to study your husband's taste, not mine, in the matter."
"Why shouldn't we live near you? Mr. Hamleigh might buy a place. There is generally something to be had if one watches one's opportunity."
"Do you think he would care to sink his fortune, or any part of it, in a Cornish estate, or to live amidst these wild hills?"
"He says he adores this place."
"He is in love, and would swear as much of a worse place. No, Belle, I am not foolish enough to suppose that you and Mr. Hamleigh are to settle for life at the end of the world. This house shall be your home whenever you choose to occupy it; and I hope you will come and stay with me sometimes, for I shall be very lonely without you."
"Dear Auntie, you know how I love you; you know how completely happy I have been with you—how impossible it is that anything can ever lessen my love."
"I believe that, dear girl; but it is rarely now-a-days that Ruth follows Naomi. Our modern Ruths go where their lovers go, and worship the same gods. But I don't want to be selfish or unjust, dear. I will try to rejoice in your happiness. And if Angus Hamleigh will only be a little patient; if he will give me time to grow used to the loss of you, he shall have you with your adopted mother's blessing."
"He shall not have me without it," said Christabel, looking up at her aunt with steadfast eyes.
She had said no word of that early doom of which Angus had told her. For worlds she could not have revealed that fatal truth. She had tried to put away every thought of it while she talked with her aunt. Angus had urged her beforehand to be perfectly frank, to tell Mrs. Tregonell what a mere wreck of a life it was which her lover offered her: but she had refused.
"Let that be our secret," she said, in her low sweet voice. "We want no one's pity. We will bear our sorrow together. And, oh, Angus! my faith is so strong. God, who has made me so happy by the gift of your love, will not take you from me. If—if your life is to be brief, mine will not be long."
"My dearest! if the gods will it so, we will know no parting, but be translated into some new kind of life together—a modern Baucis and Philemon. I think it would be wiser—better, to tell your aunt everything. But if you think otherwise——"
"I will tell her nothing, except that you love me, and that, with her consent, I am going to be your wife;" and with this determination Christabel had made her confession to her aunt.
The ice once broken, everybody reconciled herself or himself to the new aspect of affairs at Mount Royal. In less than a week it seemed the most natural thing in life that Angus and Christabel should be engaged. There was no marked change in their mode of life. They rambled upon the hills, and went boating on fine mornings, exploring that wonderful coast where the sea-birds congregate, on rocky isles and fortresses rising sheer out of the sea—in mighty caves, the very tradition whereof sounds terrible—caves that seem to have no ending, but to burrow into unknown, unexplored regions, towards the earth's centre.
With Major Bree for their skipper, and a brace of sturdy boatmen, Angus, Christabel, and Jessie Bridgeman spent several mild October mornings on the sea—now towards Cambeak, anon towards Trebarwith. Tintagel from the beach was infinitely grander than Tintagel in its landward aspect. "Here," as Norden says, was "that rocky and winding way up the steep sea-cliff, under which the sea-waves wallow, and so assail the foundation of the isle, as may astonish an unstable brain to consider the peril, for the least slip of the foot leads the whole body into the devouring sea."
To climb these perilous paths, to spring from rock to rock upon the slippery beach, landing on some long green slimy slab over which the sea washes, was Christabel's delight—and Mr. Hamleigh showed no lack of agility or daring. His health had improved marvellously in that invigorating air. Christabel, noteful of every change of hue in the beloved face, saw how much more healthy a tinge cheek and brow had taken since Mr. Hamleigh came to Mount Royal. He had no longer the exhausted look or the languid air of a man who had untimely squandered his stock of life and health. His eye had brightened—with no hectic light, but with the clear sunshine of a mind at ease. He was altered in every way for the better.
And now the autumn evenings were putting on a wintry air—the lights were twinkling early in the Alpine street of Boscastle. The little harbour was dark at five o'clock. Mr. Hamleigh had been nearly two months at Mount Royal, and he told himself that it was time for leave-taking. Fain would he have stayed on—stayed until that blissful morning when Christabel and he might kneel, side by side, before the altar in Minster Church, and be made one for ever—one in life and death—in a union as perfect as that which was symbolized by the plant that grew out of Tristan's tomb and went down into the grave of his mistress.
Unhappily, Mrs. Tregonell had made up her mind that her niece should not be married until she was twenty years of age—and Christabel's twentieth birthday would not arrive till the following Midsummer. To a lover's impatience so long an interval seemed an eternity; but Mrs. Tregonell had been very gracious in her consent to his betrothal, so he could not disobey her.
"Christabel has seen so little of the world," said the dowager. "I should like to give her one season in London before she marries—just to rub off a little of the rusticity."
"She is perfect—I would not have her changed for worlds," protested Angus.
"Nor I. But she ought to know a little more of society before she has to enter it as your wife. I don't think a London season will spoil her—and it will please me to chaperon her—though I have no doubt I shall seem rather an old-fashioned chaperon."
"That is just possible," said Angus, smiling, as he thought how closely his divinity was guarded. "The chaperons of the present day are very easy-going people—or, perhaps I ought to say, that the young ladies of the present day have a certain Yankee go-a-headishness which very much lightens the chaperon's responsibility. In point of fact, the London chaperon has dwindled into a formula, and no doubt she will soon be improved off the face of society."
"So much the worse for society," answered the lady of the old school. And then she continued, with a friendly air,—
"I dare say you know that I have a house in Bolton Row. I have not lived in it since my husband's death—but it is mine, and I can have it made comfortable between this and the early spring. I have been thinking that it would be better for you and Christabel to be married in London. The law business would be easier settled—and you may have relations and friends who would like to be at your wedding, yet who would hardly care to come to Boscastle."
"Itisa long way," admitted Angus. "And people are so inconsistent. They think nothing of going to the Engadine, yet grumble consumedly at a journey of a dozen hours in their native land—as if England were not worth the exertion."
"Then I think we are agreed that London is the best place for the wedding," said Mrs. Tregonell.
"I am perfectly content. But if you suggested Timbuctoo I should be just as happy."
This being settled, Mrs. Tregonell wrote at once to her agent, with instructions to set the old house in Bolton Row in order for the season immediately after Easter, and Christabel and her lover had to reconcile their minds to the idea of a long dreary winter of severance.
Miss Courtenay had grown curiously grave and thoughtful since her engagement—a change which Jessie, who watched her closely, observed with some surprise. It seemed as if she had passed from girlhood into womanhood in the hour in which she pledged herself to Angus Hamleigh. She had for ever done with the thoughtless gaiety of youth that knows not care. She had taken upon herself the burden of an anxious, self-sacrificing love. To no one had she spoken of her lover's precarious hold upon life; but the thought of by how frail a tenure she held her happiness was ever present with her. "How can I be good enough to him?—how can I do enough to make his life happy?" she thought, "when it may be for so short a time."
With this ever-present consciousness of a fatal future, went the desire to make her lover forget his doom, and the ardent hope that the sentence might be revoked—that the doom pronounced by human judgment might yet be reversed. Indeed, Angus had himself begun to make light of his malady. Who could tell that the famous physician was not a false prophet, after all? The same dire announcement of untimely death had been made to Leigh Hunt, who contrived somehow—not always in the smoothest waters—to steer his frail bark into the haven of old age. Angus spoke of this, hopefully, to Christabel, as they loitered within the roofless crumbling walls of the ancient oratory above St. Nectan's Kieve, one sunny November morning, Miss Bridgeman rambling on the crest of the hill, with the black sheep-dog, Randie, under the polite fiction of blackberry hunting, among hedges which had long been shorn of their last berry, though the freshness of the lichens and ferns still lingered in this sheltered nook.
"Yes, I know that cruel doctor was mistaken!" said Christabel, her lips quivering a little, her eyes wide and grave, but tearless, as they gazed at her lover. "I know it, I know it!"
"I know that I am twice as strong and well as I was when he saw me," answered Angus; "you have worked as great a miracle for me as ever was wrought at the grave of St. Mertheriana in Minster Churchyard. You have made me happy, and what can cure a man better than perfect bliss. But, oh, my darling! what is to become of me when I leave you, when I return to the beaten ways of London life, and, looking back at these delicious days, ask myself if this sweet life with you is not some dream which I have dreamed, and which can never come again?"
"You will not think anything of the kind," said Christabel, with a pretty little air of authority which charmed him—as all her looks and ways charmed him. "You know that I am sober reality, and that our lives are to be spent together. And you are not going back to London—at least not to stop there. You are going to the South of France."
"Indeed? this is the first I have heard of any such intention."
"Did not that doctor say you were to winter in the South?"
"He did. But I thought we had agreed to despise that doctor?"
"We will despise him, yet be warned by him. Why should any one, who has liberty and plenty of money, spend his winter in a smoky city, where the fog blinds and stifles him, and the frost pinches him, and the damp makes him miserable, when he can have blue skies, and sunshine and flowers, and ever so much brighter stars, a few hundred miles away? We are bound to obey each other, are we not, Angus? Is not that among our marriage vows?"
"I believe there is something about obedience—on the lady's side—but I waive that technicality. I am prepared to become an awful example of a henpecked husband. If you say I am to go southward, with the swallows, I will go—yea, verily, to Algeria or Tunis, if you insist: though I would rather be on the Riviera, whence a telegram, with the single word 'Come' would bring me to your side in forty-eight hours."
"Yes, you will go to that lovely land on the shores of the Mediterranean, and there you will be very careful of your health, so that when we meet in London, after Easter, your every look will gainsay that pitiless doctor. Will you do this, for my sake, Angus?" she pleaded, lovingly, nestling at his side, as they stood together on a narrow path that wound down to the entrance of the Kieve. They could hear the rush of the waterfall in the deep green hollow below them, and the faint flutter of loosely hanging leaves, stirred lightly by the light wind, and far away the joyous bark of a sheep-dog. No human voices, save their own, disturbed the autumnal stillness.
"This, and much more, would I do to please you, love. Indeed, if I am not to be here, I might just as well be in the South; nay, much better than in London, or Paris, both of which cities I know by heart. But don't you think we could make a compromise, and that I might spend the winter at Torquay, running over to Mount Royal for a few days occasionally?"
"No; Torquay will not do, delightful as it would be to have you so near. I have been reading about the climate in the South of France, and I am sure, if you are careful, a winter there will do you worlds of good. Next year——"
"Next year we can go there together, and you will take care of me. Was that what you were going to say, Belle?"
"Something like that."
"Yes" he said, slowly, after a thoughtful pause, "I shall be glad to be away from London, and all old associations. My past life is a worthless husk that I have done with for ever."
The Easter recess was over. Society had returned from its brief holiday—its glimpse of budding hedges and primrose-dotted banks, blue skies and blue violets, the snowy bloom of orchards, the tender green of young cornfields. Society had come back again, and was hard at the London treadmill—yawning at old operas, and damning new plays—sniggering at crowded soirées—laying down the law, each man his particular branch thereof, at carefully planned dinner parties—quarrelling and making friends again—eating and drinking—spending and wasting, and pretending to care very little about anything; for society is as salt that has lost its savour if it is not cynical and affected.
But there was onedébutanteat least that season for whom town pleasures had lost none of their freshness, for whom the old operas were all melody, and the new plays all wit—who admired everything with frankest wonder and enthusiasm, and without a thought of Horace, or Pope, or Creech, or anybody, except the lover who was always at her side, and who shed the rose-coloured light of happiness upon the commonest things. To sit in the Green Park on a mild April morning, to see the guard turn out by St. James's Palace after breakfast, to loiter away an hour or two at a picture gallery—was to be infinitely happy. Neither opera nor play, dinner nor dance, race-course nor flower-show, was needed to complete the sum of Christabel's bliss when Angus Hamleigh was with her.
He had returned from Hyères, quietest among the southern towns, wonderfully improved in health and strength. Even Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman perceived the change in him.
"I think you must have been very ill when you came to Mount Royal, Mr. Hamleigh," said Jessie, one day. "You look so much better now."
"My life was empty then—it is full now," he answered. "It is hope that keeps a man alive, and I had very little to hope for when I went westward. How strange the road of life is, and how little a man knows what is waiting for him round the corner."
The house in Bolton Row was charming; just large enough to be convenient, just small enough to be snug. At the back, the windows looked into Lord Somebody's garden—not quite a tropical paradise—nay, even somewhat flavoured with bricks and mortar—but still a garden, where, by sedulous art, the gardeners kept alive ferns and flowers, and where trees, warranted to resist smoke, put forth young leaves in the springtime, and only languished and sickened in untimely decay when the London season was over, and their function as fashionable trees had been fulfilled.
The house was furnished in a Georgian style, pleasant to modern taste. The drawing-room was of the spindle-legged order—satin-wood card tables; groups of miniatures in oval frames; Japanese folding screen, behind which Belinda might have played Bo-peep; china jars, at whose fall Narcissa might have inly suffered, while outwardly serene. The dining-room was sombre and substantial. The bedrooms had been improved by modern upholstery; for the sleeping apartments of our ancestors leave a good deal to be desired. All the windows were full of flowers—inside and out there was the perfume and colour of many blossoms. The three drawing-rooms, growing smaller to a diminishing point, like a practical lesson in perspective, were altogether charming.
Major Bree had escorted the ladies to London, and was their constant guest, camping out in a bachelor lodging in Jermyn Street, and coming across Piccadilly every day to eat his luncheon in Bolton Row, and to discuss the evening's engagements.
Long as he had been away from London, he acclimatized himself very quickly—found out everything about everybody—what singers were best worth hearing—what plays best worth seeing—what actors should be praised—which pictures should be looked at and talked about—what horses were likely to win the notable races. He was a walking guide, a living hand-book to fashionable London.
All Mrs. Tregonell's old friends—all the Cornish people who came to London—called in Bolton Row; and at every house where the lady and her niece visited there were new introductions, whereby the widow's visiting list widened like a circle in the water—and cards for dances and evening parties, afternoons and dinners were super-abundant. Christabel wanted to see everything. She had quite a country girl's taste, and cared much more for the theatre and the opera than to be dressed in a new gown, and to be crushed in a crowd of other young women in new gowns—or to sit still and be admired at a stately dinner. Nor was she particularly interested in the leaders of fashion, their ways and manners—the newest professed or professional beauty—the last social scandal. She wanted to see the great city of which she had read in history—the Tower, the Savoy, Westminster Hall, the Abbey, St. Paul's, the Temple—the London of Elizabeth, the still older London of the Edwards and Henries, the house in which Milton was born, the organ on which he played, the place where Shakespeare's Theatre once stood, the old Inn whence Chaucer's Pilgrims started on their journey. Even Dickens's London—the London of Pickwick and Winkle—the Saracen's Head at which Mr. Squeers put up—had charms for her.
"Is everything gone?" she asked, piteously, after being told how improvement had effaced the brick and mortar background of English History.
Yet there still remained enough to fill her mind with solemn thoughts of the past. She spent long hours in the Abbey, with Angus and Jessie, looking at the monuments, and recalling the lives and deeds of long vanished heroes and statesmen. The Tower, and the old Inns of Court, were full of interest. Her curiosity about old houses and streets was insatiable.
"No one less than Macaulay could satisfy you," said Angus, one day, when his memory was at fault. "A man of infinite reading, and infallible memory."
"But you have read so much, and you remember a great deal."
They had been prowling about the Whitehall end of the town in the bright early morning, before Fashion had begun to stir herself faintly among her down pillows. Christabel loved the parks and streets while the freshness of sunrise was still upon them—and these early walks were an institution.
"Where is the Decoy?" she asked Angus, one day, in St. James's Park; and on being interrogated, it appeared that she meant a certain piece of water, described in "Peveril of the Peak." All this part of London was peopled with Scott's heroes and heroines, or with suggestions of Goldsmith. Here Fenella danced before good-natured, loose-living Rowley. Here Nigel stood aside, amidst the crowd, to see Charles, Prince of Wales, and his ill-fated favourite, Buckingham, go by. Here the Citizen of the World met Beau Tibbs and the gentleman in black. For Christabel, the Park was like a scene in a stage play.
Then, after breakfast, there were long drives into fair suburban haunts, where they escaped in some degree from London smoke and London restraints of all kinds, where they could charter a boat, and row up the river to a still fairer scene, and picnic in some rushy creek, out of ken of society, and be almost as recklessly gay as if they had been at Tintagel.
These were the days Angus loved best. The days upon which he and his betrothed turned their backs upon London society, and seemed as far away from the outside world as ever they had been upon the wild western coast. Like most men educated at Eton and Oxford, and brought up in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, Angus loved the Thames with a love that was almost a passion.
"It is my native country," he said; "I have no other. All the pleasantest associations of my boyhood and youth are interwoven with the river. When I die, my spirit ought to haunt these shores, like that ghost of the 'Scholar Gipsy,' which you have read about in Arnold's poem."
He knew every bend and reach of the river—every tributary, creek, and eyot—almost every row of pollard willows, standing stunted and grim along the bank, like a line of rugged old men. He knew where the lilies grew, and where there were chances of trout. The haunts of monster pike were familiar to him—indeed, he declared that he knew many of these gentlemen personally—that they were as old as the Fontainebleau carp, and bore a charmed life.
"When I was at Eton I knew them all by sight," he said. "There was one which I set my heart upon landing, but he was ever so much stronger and cleverer than I. If I had caught him I should have worn his skin ever after, in the pride of my heart—like Hercules with his lion. But he still inhabits the same creek, still sulks among the same rushes, and devours the gentler members of the finny race by shoals. We christened him Dr. Parr, for we knew he was preternaturally old, and we thought he must, from mere force of association, be a profound scholar."
Mr. Hamleigh was always finding reasons for these country excursions, which he declared were the one sovereign antidote for the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms, and the evil effects of late hours.
"You wouldn't like to see Christabel fade and languish like the flowers in your drawing-room," he urged, when Mrs. Tregonell wanted her niece to make a round of London visits, instead of going down to Maidenhead on the coach, to lunch somewhere up the river. Not at Skindle's—or at any other hotel—but in the lazy sultry quiet of some sequestered nook below the hanging woods of Clieveden. "I'm sure you can spare her just for to-day—such a perfect spring day. It would be a crime to waste such sunlight and such balmy air in town drawing-rooms. Could not you strain a point, dear Mrs. Tregonell, and come with us?"
Aunt Diana shook her head. No, the fatigue would be too much—she had lived such a quiet life at Mount Royal, that a very little exertion tired her. Besides she had some calls to make; and then there was a dinner at Lady Bulteel's, to which she must take Christabel, and an evening party afterwards.
Christabel shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
"I am beginning to hate parties," she said. "They are amusing enough when one is in them—but they are all alike—and it would be so much nicer for us to live our own lives, and go wherever Angus likes. Don't you think you might defer the calls, and come with us to-day, Auntie dear?"
Auntie dear shook her head.
"Even if I were equal to the fatigue, Belle, I couldn't defer my visits. Thursday is Lady Onslow's day—and Mrs. Trevannion's day—and Mrs. Vansittart's day—and when people have been so wonderfully kind to us, it would be uncivil not to call."
"And you will sit in stifling drawing-rooms, with the curtains lowered to shut out the sunlight—and you will drink ever so much more tea than is good for you—and hear a lot of people prosing about the same things over and over again—Epsom and the Opera—and Mrs. This and Miss That—and Mrs. Somebody's new book, which everybody reads and talks about, just as if there were not another book in the world, or as if the old book counted for nothing," concluded Christabel, contemptuously, having by this time discovered the conventional quality of kettle-drum conversations, wherein people discourse authoritatively about books they have not read, plays they have not seen, and people they do not know.
Mr. Hamleigh had his own way, and carried off Christabel and Miss Bridgeman to the White Horse Cellar, with the faithful Major in attendance.
"You will bring Belle home in time to dress for Lady Bulteel's dinner," said Mrs. Tregonell, impressively, as they were departing. "Mind, Major, I hold you responsible for her return. You are the only sober person in the party. I believe Jessie Bridgeman is as wild as a hawk, when she gets out of my sight."
Jessie's shrewd grey eyes twinkled at the reproof.
"I am not very sorry to get away from Bolton Row, and the fine ladies who come to see you—and who always look at me as much as to say, 'Who is she?—what is she?—how did she come here?'—and who are obviously surprised if I say anything intelligent—first, at my audacity in speaking before company, and next that such a thing as I should have any brains."
"Nonsense, Jessie, how thin-skinned you are; everybody praises you," said Mrs. Tregonell, while they all waited on the threshold for Christabel to fasten her eight-button gloves—a delicate operation, in which she was assisted by Mr. Hamleigh.
"How clever you are at buttoning gloves," exclaimed Christabel; "one would think you had served an apprenticeship."
"That's not the first pair he has buttoned, I'll wager," cried the Major, in his loud, hearty voice; and then, seeing Angus redden ever so slightly, and remembering certain rumours which he had heard at his club, the kindly bachelor regretted his speech.
Happily, Christabel was engaged at this moment in kissing her aunt, and did not observe Mr. Hamleigh's heightened colour. Ten minutes later they were all seated outside the coach, bowling down Piccadilly Hill on their way westward.
"In the good old days this is how you would have started for Cornwall," said Angus.
"I wish we were going to Cornwall now."
"So do I, if your aunt would let us be married at that dear little church in the glen. Christabel, when I die, if you have the ordering of my funeral, be sure that I am buried in Minster Churchyard."
"Angus, don't," murmured Christabel, piteously.
"Dearest, 'we must all die—'tis an inevitable chance—the first Statute in Magna Charta—it is an everlasting Act of Parliament'—that's what he says of death, dear, who jested at all things, and laid his cap and bells down one day in a lodging in Bond Street—the end of which we passed just now—sad and lonely, and perhaps longing for the kindred whom he had forsaken."
"You mean Sterne," said Christabel. "Jessie and I hunted for that house, yesterday. I think we all feel sorrier for him than for many a better man."
In the early afternoon they had reached their destination—a lovely creek shaded by chestnut and alder—a spot known to few, and rarely visited. Here, under green leaves, they moored their boat, and lunched on the contents of a basket which had been got ready for them at Skindle's—dawdling over the meal—taking their ease—full of talk and laughter. Never had Angus looked better, or talked more gaily. Jessie, too, was at her brightest, and had a great deal to say.
"It is wonderful how well you two get on," said Christabel, smiling at her friend's prompt capping of some bitter little speech from Angus. "You always seem to understand each other so quickly—indeed, Jessie seems to know what Angus is going to say before the words are spoken. I can see it in her face."
"Perhaps, that is because we are both cynics," said Mr. Hamleigh.
"Yes, that is no doubt the reason," said Jessie, reddening a little; "the bond of sympathy between us is founded on our very poor opinion of our fellow-creatures."
But after this Miss Bridgeman became more silent, and gave way much less than usual to those sudden impulses of sharp speech which Christabel had noticed.
They landed presently, and went wandering away into the inland—a strange world to Christabel, albeit very familiar to her lover.
"Not far from here there is a dell which is the most wonderful place in the world for bluebells," said Angus, looking at his watch. "I wonder whether we should have time to walk there."
"Let us try, if it is not very, very far," urged Christabel. "I adore bluebells, and skylarks, and the cuckoo, and all the dear country flowers and birds. I have been surfeited with hot-house flowers and caged canaries since I came to London."
A skylark was singing in the deep blue, far aloft, over the little wood in which they were wandering. It was the loneliest, loveliest spot; and Christabel felt as if it would be agony to leave it. She and her lover seemed ever so much nearer, dearer, more entirely united here than in London drawing-rooms, where she hardly dared to be civil to him lest society should be amused or contemptuous. Here she could cling to his arm—it seemed a strong and helpful arm now—and look up at his face with love irradiating her own countenance, and feel no more ashamed than Eve in the Garden. Here they could talk without fear of being heard; for Jessie and the Major followed at a most respectful distance—just keeping the lovers in view, and no more.
Christabel ran back presently to say they were going to look for bluebells.
"You'll come, won't you?" she pleaded; "Angus says the dell is not far off."
"I don't believe a bit in his topography," said the Major; "do you happen to know that it is three o'clock, and that you are due at a State dinner?"
"At eight," cried Christabel, "ages away. Angus says the train goes at six. We are to have some tea at Skindle's, at five. We have two hours in which to do what we like."
"There is the row back to Skindle's."
"Say half an hour for that, which gives us ninety minutes for the bluebells."
"Do you count life by minutes, child?" asked the Major.
"Yes, Uncle Oliver, when I am utterly happy; for then every minute is precious."
And then she and her lover went rambling on, talking, laughing, poetising under the flickering shadows and glancing lights; while the other two followed at a leisurely pace, like the dull foot of reality following the winged heel of romance. Jessie Bridgeman was only twenty-seven, yet in her own mind it seemed as if she were the Major's contemporary—nay, indeed, his senior; for he had never known that grinding poverty which ages the eldest daughter in a large shabby genteel family. Jessie Bridgeman had been old in care before she left off pinafores. Her childish pleasure in the shabbiest of dolls had been poisoned by a precocious familiarity with poor-rates, and water-rates—a sickening dread of the shabby man in pepper-and-salt tweed, with the end of an oblong account-book protruding from his breast-pocket, who came to collect money that was never ready for him, and departed, leaving a printed notice, like the trail of the serpent, behind him. The first twenty years of Jessie Bridgeman's life had been steeped in poverty, every day, every hour flavoured with the bitter taste of deprivation and the world's contempt, the want of common comforts, the natural longing for fairer surroundings, the ever-present dread of a still lower deep in which pinching should become starvation, and even the shabby home should be no longer tenable. With a father whose mission upon this earth was to docket and file a certain class of accounts in Somerset House, for a salary of a hundred-and-eighty pounds a year, and a bi-annual rise of five, a harmless man, whose only crime was to have married young and made himself responsible for an unanticipated family—"How could a young fellow of two-and-twenty know that God was going to afflict him with ten children?" Mr. Bridgeman used to observe plaintively—with a mother whose life was one long domestic drudgery, who spent more of her days in a back kitchen than is consistent with the maintenance of personal dignity, and whose only chance of an airing was that stern necessity which impelled her to go and interview the tax-gatherer, in the hope of obtaining "time"—Jessie's opportunities of tasting the pleasures of youth had been of the rarest. Once in six months or so, perhaps, a shabby-genteel friend gave her father an order for some theatre, which was in that palpable stage of ruin when orders are freely given to the tavern loafer and the stage-door hanger-on—and then, oh, what rapture to trudge from Shepherd's Bush to the West End, and to spend a long hot evening in the gassy paradise of the Upper Boxes! Once in a year or so Mr. Bridgeman gave his wife and eldest girl a dinner at an Italian Restaurant near Leicester Square—a cheap little pinchy dinner, in which the meagre modicum of meat and poultry was eked out by much sauce, redolent of garlic, by delicious foreign bread, and too-odorous foreign cheese. It was a tradition in the family that Mr. Bridgeman had been a great dinner-giver in his bachelor days, and knew every restaurant in London.
"They don't forget me here, you see," he said, when the sleek Italian waiter brought him extra knives and forks for the dual portion which was to serve for three.
Such had been the utmost limit of Jessie's pleasures before she answered an advertisement in theTimes, which stated that a lady, living in a retired part of Cornwall, required the services of a young lady who could write a good hand, keep accounts, and had some knowledge of housekeeping—who was willing, active, cheerful, and good-tempered. Salary, thirty pounds per annum.
It was not the first advertisement by many that Jessie had answered. Indeed, she seemed, to her own mind, to have been doing nothing but answering advertisements, and hoping against hope for a favourable reply, since her eighteenth birthday, when it had been borne in upon her, as the Evangelicals say, that she ought to go out into the world, and do something for her living, making one mouth less to be filled from the family bread-pan.
"There's no use talking, mother," she said, when Mrs. Bridgeman tried to prove that the bright useful eldest daughter cost nothing; "I eat, and food costs money. I have a dreadfully healthy appetite, and if I could get a decent situation I should cost you nothing, and should be able to send you half my salary. And now that Milly is getting a big girl——"
"She hasn't an idea of making herself useful," sighed the mother; "only yesterday she let the milkman ring three times and then march away without leaving us a drop of milk, because she was too proud or too lazy to open the door, while Sarah and I were up to our eyes in the wash."
"Perhaps she didn't hear him," suggested Jessie, charitably.
"She must have heard his pails if she didn't hearhim," said Mrs. Bridgeman; "besides he 'yooped,' for I heard him, and relied upon that idle child for taking in the milk. But put not your trust in princes," concluded the overworked matron, rather vaguely.
"Salary, thirty pounds per annum," repeated Jessie, reading the Cornish lady's advertisement over and over again, as if it had been a charm; "why that would be a perfect fortune; think what you could do with an extra fifteen pounds a year!"
"My dear, it would make my life heaven. But you would want all the money for your dress: you would have to be always nice. There would be dinner parties, no doubt, and you would be asked to come into the drawing-room of an evening," said Mrs. Bridgeman, whose ideas of the governess's social status were derived solely from "Jane Eyre."
Jessie's reply to the advertisement was straight-forward and succinct, and she wrote a fine bold hand. These two facts favourably impressed Mrs. Tregonell, and of the three or four dozen answers which her advertisement brought forth, Jessie's pleased her the most. The young lady's references to her father's landlord and the incumbent of the nearest church, were satisfactory. So one bleak wintry morning Miss Bridgeman left Paddington in one of the Great Western's almost luxurious third-class carriages, and travelled straight to Launceston, whence a carriage—the very first private carriage she had ever sat in, and every detail of which was a wonder and a delight to her—conveyed her to Mount Royal.
That fine old Tudor manor-house, after the shabby ten-roomed villa at Shepherd's Bush—badly built, badly drained, badly situated, badly furnished, always smelling of yesterday's dinner, always damp and oozy with yesterday's rain—was almost too beautiful to be real. For days after her arrival Jessie felt as if she must be walking about in a dream. The elegancies and luxuries of life were all new to her. The perfect quiet and order of this country home; the beauty in every detail—from the old silver urn and Worcester china which greeted her eyes on the breakfast-table, to the quaint little Queen Anne candlestick which she carried up to her bedroom at night—seemed like a revelation of a hitherto unknown world. The face of Nature—the hills and the moors—the sea and the cliffs—was as new to her as all that indoor luxury. An occasional week at Ramsgate or South-end had been all her previous experience of this world's loveliness. Happily, she was not a shy or awkward young person. She accommodated herself with wonderful ease to her altered surroundings—was not tempted to drink out of a finger-glass, and did not waver for a moment as to the proper use of her fish-knife and fork—took no wine—and ate moderately of that luxurious and plentiful fare which was as new and wonderful to her as if she had been transported from the barren larder of Shepherd's Bush to that fabulous land where the roasted piglings ran about with knives and forks in their backs, squeaking, in pig language, "Come, eat me; come, eat me."
Often in this paradise of pasties and clotted cream, mountain mutton and barn-door fowls, she thought with a bitter pang of the hungry circle at home, with whom dinner was the exception rather than the rule, and who made believe to think tea and bloaters an ever so much cosier meal than a formal repast of roast and boiled.
On the very day she drew her first quarter's salary—not for worlds would she have anticipated it by an hour—Jessie ran off to a farm she knew of, and ordered a monster hamper to be sent to Rosslyn Villa, Shepherd's Bush—a hamper full of chickens, and goose, and cream, and butter, with a big saffron-flavoured cake for its crowning glory—such a cake as would delight the younger members of the household!
Nor did she forget her promise to send the over-tasked house-mother half her earnings. "You needn't mind taking the money, dearest," she wrote in the letter which enclosed the Post-Office order. "Mrs. Tregonell has given me a lovely grey silk gown; and I have bought a brown merino at Launceston, and a new hat and jacket. You would stare to see how splendidly your homely little Jessie is dressed! Christabel found out the date of my birthday, and gave me a dozen of the loveliest gloves, my favourite grey, with four buttons. A whole dozen! Did you ever see a dozen of gloves all at once, mother? You have no idea how lovely they look. I quite shrink from breaking into the packet; but I must wear a pair at church next Sunday, in compliment to the dear little giver. If it were not for thoughts of you and the brood, dearest, I should be intensely happy here! The house is an ideal house—the people are ideal people; and they treat me ever so much better than I deserve. I think I have the knack of being useful to them, which is a great comfort; and I am able to get on with the servants—old servants who had a great deal too much of their own way before I came—which is also a comfort. It is not easy to introduce reform without making oneself detested. Christabel, who has been steeping herself in French history lately, calls me Turgot in petticoats—by which you will see she has a high opinion of my ministerial talents—if you can remember Turgot, poor dear! amidst all your worries," added Jessie, bethinking herself that her mother's book-learning had gone to seed in an atmosphere of petty domestic cares—mending—washing—pinching—contriving.
This and much more had Jessie Bridgeman written seven years ago, while Mount Royal was still new to her. The place and the people—at least those two whom she first knew there—had grown dearer as time went on. When Leonard came home from the University, he and his mother's factotum did not get on quite so well as Mrs. Tregonell had hoped. Jessie was ready to be kind and obliging to the heir of the house; but Leonard did not like her—in the language of the servant's hall, he "put his back up at her." He looked upon her as an interloper and a spy, especially suspecting her in the latter capacity, perhaps from a lurking consciousness that some of his actions would not bear the fierce light of unfriendly observation. In vain did his mother plead for her favourite.
"You have no idea how good she is!" said Mrs. Tregonell.
"You're perfectly right there, mother; I have not," retorted Leonard.
"And so useful to me! I should be lost without her!"
"Of course; that's exactly what she wants: creeping and crawling—and pinching and saving—docking your tradesmen's accounts—grinding your servants—fingering your income—till, by-and-by, she will contrive to finger a good deal of it into her own pocket! That's the way they all begin—that's the way the man in the play, Sir Giles Overreach's man, began, you may be sure—till by-and-by he got Sir Giles under his thumb. And that's the way Miss Bridgeman will serve you. I wonder you are so shortsighted!"
Weak as Mrs. Tregonell was in her love for her son, she was too staunch to be set against a person she liked by any such assertions as these. She was quite able to form her own opinion about Miss Bridgeman's character, and she found the girl straight as an arrow—candid almost to insolence, yet pleasant withal; industrious, clever—sharp as a needle in all domestic details—able to manage pounds as carefully as she had managed pence and sixpences.
"Mother used to give me the housekeeping purse," she said, "and I did what I liked. I was always Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a very small exchequer; but I learnt the habit of spending and managing, and keeping accounts."
While active and busy about domestic affairs, verifying accounts, settling supplies and expenditures with the cook-housekeeper, making herself a veritable clerk of the kitchen, and overlooking the housemaids in the finer details of their work, Miss Bridgeman still found ample leisure for the improvement of her mind. In a quiet country-house, where family prayers are read at eight o'clock every morning, the days are long enough for all things. Jessie had no active share in Christabel's education, which was Mrs. Tregonell's delight and care; but she contrived to learn what Christabel learnt—to study with her and read with her, and often to outrun her in the pursuit of a favourite subject. They learnt German together, they read good French books together, and were companions in the best sense of the word. It was a happy life—monotonous, uneventful, but a placid, busy, all-satisfying life, which Jessie Bridgeman led during those six years and a half which went before the advent of Angus Hamleigh at Mount Royal. The companion's salary had long ago been doubled, and Jessie, who had no caprices, and whose wants were modest, was able to send forty pounds a year to Shepherd's Bush, and found a rich reward in the increased cheerfulness of the letters from home.
Just so much for Jessie Bridgeman's history as she walks by Major Bree's side in the sunlight, with a sharply cut face, impressed with a gravity beyond her years, and marked with precocious lines that were drawn there by the iron hand of poverty before she had emerged from girlhood. Of late, even amidst the elegant luxuries of May Fair, in a life given over to amusement, among flowers and bright scenery, and music and pictures, those lines had been growing deeper—lines that hinted at a secret care.
"Isn't it delightful to see them together!" said the Major, looking after those happy lovers with a benevolent smile.
"Yes; I suppose it is very beautiful to see such perfect happiness, like Juan and Haidée before Lambro swooped down upon them," returned Miss Bridgeman, who was too outspoken to be ashamed of having read Byron's epic.
Major Bree had old-fashioned notions about the books women should and should not read, and Byron, except for elegant extracts, was in hisIndex expurgatorius. If a woman was allowed to read the "Giaour," she would inevitably read "Don Juan," he argued; there would be no restraining her, after she had tasted blood—no use in offering her another poet, and saying, Now you can read "Thalaba," or "Peter Bell."
"They were so happy!" said Jessie dreamily, "so young, and one so innocent; and then came fear, severance, despair, and death for the innocent sinner. It is a terrible story!"
"Fortunately, there is no tyrannical father in this case," replied the cheerful Major. "Everybody is pleased with the engagement—everything smiles upon the lovers."
"No, it is all sunshine," said Jessie; "there is no shadow, if—if Mr. Hamleigh is as worthy of his betrothed as we have all agreed to think him. Yet there was a time when you spoke rather disparagingly of him."
"My gossiping old tongue should be cut out for repeating club scandals! Hamleigh is a generous-hearted, noble-natured fellow, and I am not afraid to trust him with the fate of a girl whom I love almost as well as if she were my own daughter. I don't know whether all men love their daughters, by-the-by. There are daughters and daughters—I have seen some that it would be tough work to love. But for Christabel my affection is really parental. I have seen her bud and blossom, a beautiful living flower, a rose in the garden of life."
"And you think Mr. Hamleigh is worthy of her?" said Miss Bridgeman, looking at him searchingly with her shrewd grey eyes, "in spite of what you heard at the clubs?"
"Aficofor what I heard at the clubs!" exclaimed the Major, blowing the slander away from the tips of his fingers as if it had been thistledown. "Every man has a past, and every man outlives it. The present and the future are what we have to consider. It is not a man's history, but the man himself, that concerns us; and I say that Angus Hamleigh is a good man, a right-meaning man, a brave and generous man. If a man is to be judged by his history, where would David be, I should like to know? and yet David was the chosen of the Lord!" added the Major, conclusively.
"I hope," said Jessie, earnestly, with vague visions of intrigue and murder conjured up in her mind, "that Mr. Hamleigh was never as bad as David."
"No, no," murmured the Major, "the circumstances of modern times are so different, don't you see?—an advanced civilization—a greater respect for human life. Napoleon the First did a good many queer things; but you would not get a monarch and a commander-in-chief to act as David and Joab acted now-a-days. Public opinion would be too strong for them. They would be afraid of the newspapers."
"Was it anything very dreadful that you heard at the clubs three years ago?" asked Jessie, still hovering about a forbidden theme, with a morbid curiosity strange in one whose acts and thoughts were for the most part ruled by common sense.
The Major, who would not allow a woman to read "Don Juan," had his own ideas of what ought and ought not to be told to a woman.
"My dear Miss Bridgeman," he said, "I would not for worlds pollute your ears with the ribald trash men talk in a club smoking-room. Let it suffice for you to know that I believe in Angus Hamleigh, although I have taken the trouble to make myself acquainted with the follies of his youth."
They walked on in silence for a little while after this, and then the Major said, in a voice full of kindness:
"I think you went to see your own people yesterday, did you not?"
"Yes; Mrs. Tregonell was kind enough to give me a morning, and I spent it with my mother and sisters."
The Major had questioned her more than once about her home, in a way which indicated so kindly an interest that it could not possibly be mistaken for idle curiosity. And she had told him, with perfect frankness, what manner of people her family were—in no wise hesitating to admit their narrow means, and the necessity that she should earn her own living.
"I hope you found them well and happy."
"I thought my mother looked thin and weary. The girls were wonderfully well—great hearty, overgrown creatures! I felt myself a wretched little shrimp among them. As for happiness—well, they are as happy as people can expect to be who are very poor!"
"Do you really think poverty is incompatible with happiness?" asked the Major, with a philosophical air; "I have had a particularly happy life, and I have never been rich."
"Ah, that makes all the difference!" exclaimed Jessie. "You have never been rich, but they have always been poor. You can't conceive what a gulf lies between those two positions. You have been obliged to deny yourself a great many of the mere idle luxuries of life, I dare say—hunters, the latest improvements in guns, valuable dogs, continental travelling; but you have had enough for all the needful things—for neatness, cleanliness, an orderly household; a well-kept flower-garden, everything spotless and bright about you; no slipshod maid-of-all-work printing her greasy thumb upon your dishes—nothing out at elbows. Your house is small, but of its kind it is perfection; and your garden—well, if I had such a garden in such a situation I would not envy Eve the Eden she lost."
"Is that really your opinion?" cried the enraptured soldier; "or are you saying this just to please me—to reconcile me to my jog-trot life, my modest surroundings?"
"I mean every word I say."
"Then it is in your power to make me richer in happiness than Rothschild or Baring. Dearest Miss Bridgeman, dearest Jessie, I think you must know how devotedly I love you! Till to-day I have not dared to speak, for my limited means would not have allowed me to maintain a wife as the woman I love ought to be maintained; but this morning's post brought me the news of the death of an old Admiral of the Blue, who was my father's first cousin. He was a bachelor like myself—left the Navy soon after the signing of Sir Henry Pottinger's treaty at Nankin in '42—never considered himself well enough off to marry, but lived in a lodging at Devonport, and hoarded and hoarded and hoarded for the mere abstract pleasure of accumulating his surplus income; and the result of his hoarding—combined with a little dodging of his investments in stocks and shares—is, that he leaves me a solid four hundred a year in Great Westerns. It is not much from some people's point of view, but, added to my existing income, it makes me very comfortable. I could afford to indulge all your simple wishes, my dearest! I could afford to help your family!"
He took her hand. She did not draw it away, but pressed his gently, with the grasp of friendship.
"Don't say one word more—you are too good—you are the best and kindest man I have ever known!" she said, "and I shall love and honour you all my life; but I shall never marry! I made up my mind about that, oh! ever so long ago. Indeed, I never expected to be asked, if the truth must be told."
"I understand," said the Major, terribly dashed. "I am too old. Don't suppose that I have not thought about that. I have. But I fancied the difficulty might be got over. You are so different from the common run of girls—so staid, so sensible, of such a contented disposition. But I was a fool to suppose that any girl of——"
"Seven-and-twenty," interrupted Jessie; "it is a long way up the hill of girlhood. I shall soon be going down on the other side."
"At any rate, you are more than twenty years my junior. I was a fool to forget that."
"Dear Major Bree," said Jessie, very earnestly, "believe me, it is not for that reason, I say No. If you were as young—as young as Mr. Hamleigh—the answer would be just the same. I shall never marry. There is no one, prince or peasant, whom I care to marry. You are much too good a man to be married for the sake of a happy home, for status in the world, kindly companionship—all of which you could give me. If I loved you as you ought to be loved I would answer proudly, Yes; but I honour you too much to give you half love."
"Perhaps you do not know with how little I could be satisfied," urged the Major, opposing what he imagined to be a romantic scruple with the shrewd common-sense of his fifty years' experience. "I want a friend, a companion, a helpmate, and I am sure you could be all those to me. If I could only make you happy!"
"You could not!" interrupted Jessie, with cruel decisiveness. "Pray, never speak of this again, dear Major Bree. Your friendship has been very pleasant to me; it has been one of the many charms of my life at Mount Royal. I would not lose it for the world. And we can always be friends, if you will only remember that I have made up my mind—irrevocably—never to marry."
"I must needs obey you," said the Major, deeply disappointed, but too unselfish to be angry. "I will not be importunate. Yet one word I must say. Your future—if you do not marry—what is that to be? Of course, so long as Mrs. Tregonell lives, your home will be at Mount Royal—but I fear that does not settle the question for long. My dear friend does not appear to me a long-lived woman. I have seen traces of premature decay. When Christabel is married, and Mrs. Tregonell is dead, where is your home to be?"
"Providence will find me one," answered Jessie, cheerfully. "Providence is wonderfully kind to plain little spinsters with a knack of making themselves useful. I have been doing my best to educate myself ever since I have been at Mount Royal. It is so easy to improve one's mind when there are no daily worries about the tax-gatherer and the milkman—and when I am called upon to seek a new home, I can go out as a governess—and drink the cup of life as it is mixed for governesses—as Charlotte Brontë says. Perhaps I shall write a novel, as she did, although I have not her genius."
"I would not be sure of that," said the Major. "I believe there is some kind of internal fire burning you up, although you are outwardly so quiet. I think it would have been your salvation to accept the jog-trot life and peaceful home I have offered you."
"Very likely," replied Jessie, with a shrug and a sigh. "But how many people reject salvation. They would rather be miserable in their own way than happy in anybody else's way."
The Major answered never a word. For him all the glory of the day had faded. He walked slowly on by Jessie's side, meditating upon her words—wondering why she had so resolutely refused him. There had been not the least wavering—she had not even seemed to be taken by surprise—her mind had been made up long ago—not him, nor any other man, would she wed.
"Some early disappointment, perhaps," mused the Major—"a curate at Shepherd's Bush—those young men have a great deal to answer for."
They came to the hyacinth dell—an earthly paradise to the two happy lovers, who were sitting on a mossy bank, in a sheet of azure bloom, which, seen from the distance, athwart young trees, looked like blue, bright water.
To the Major the hazel copse and the bluebells—the young oak plantation—and all the lovely details of mosses and flowering grasses, and starry anemones—were odious. He felt in a hurry to get back to his club, and steep himself in London pleasures. All the benevolence seemed to have been crushed out of him.
Christabel saw that her old friend was out of spirits, and contrived to be by his side on their way back to the boat, trying to cheer him with sweetest words and loveliest smiles.
"Have we tired you?" she asked. "The afternoon is very warm."
"Tired me! You forget how I ramble over the hills at home. No; I am just a trifle put out—but it is nothing. I had news of a death this morning—a death that makes me richer by four hundred a year. If it were not for respect for my dead cousin who so kindly made me his heir, I think I should go to-night to the most rowdy theatre in London, just to put myself in spirits."
"Which are the rowdy theatres, Uncle Oliver?"
"Well, perhaps I ought not to use such a word. The theatres are all good in their way—but there are theatres and theatres. I should choose one of those to which the young men go night after night to see the same piece—a burlesque, or an opera bouffe—plenty of smart jokes and pretty girls."
"Why have you not taken me to those theatres?"
"We have not come to them yet. You have seen Shakespeare and modern comedy—which is rather a weak material as compared with Sheridan—or even with Colman and Morton, whose plays were our staple entertainment when I was a boy. You have heard all the opera singers?"
"Yes, you have been very good. But I want to see 'Cupid and Psyche'—two of my partners last night talked to me of 'Cupid and Psyche,' and were astounded that I had not seen it. I felt quite ashamed of my ignorance. I asked one of my partners, who was particularly enthusiastic, to tell me all about the play—and he did—to the best of his ability, which was not great—and he said that a Miss Mayne—Stella Mayne—who plays Psyche, is simply adorable. She is the loveliest woman in London, he says—and was greatly surprised that she had not been pointed out to me in the Park. Now really, Uncle Oliver, this is very remiss in you—you who are so clever in showing me famous people when we are driving in the Park."