"My dear, we have not happened to see her—that is all," replied the Major, without any responsive smile at the bright young face smiling up at him.
"You have seen her, I suppose?"
"Yes, I saw her when I was last in London."
"Not this time?"
"Not this time."
"You most unenthusiastic person. But, I understand your motive. You have been waiting an opportunity to take Jessie and me to see this divine Psyche. Is she absolutely lovely?"
"Loveliness is a matter of opinion. She is generally accepted as a particularly pretty woman."
"When will you take me to see her?"
"I have no idea. You have so many engagements—your aunt is always making new ones. I can do nothing without her permission. Surely you like dancing better than sitting in a theatre?"
"No, I do not. Dancing is delightful enough—but to be in a theatre is to be in fairy-land. It is like going into a new world. I leave myself, and my own life, at the doors—and go to live and love and suffer and be glad with the people in the play. To see a powerful play—really well acted—such acting as we have seen—is to live a new life from end to end in a few hours. It is like getting the essence of a lifetime without any of the actual pain—for when the situation is too terrible, one can pinch oneself and say—it is only a dream—an acted dream."
"If you like powerful plays—plays that make you tremble and cry—you would not care twopence for 'Cupid and Psyche,'" said Major Bree. "It is something between a burlesque and a fairy comedy—a most frivolous kind of entertainment, I believe."
"I don't care how frivolous it is. I have set my heart upon seeing it. I don't want to be out of the fashion. If you won't get me a box at the—where is it?"
"The Kaleidoscope Theatre."
"At the Kaleidoscope! I shall ask Angus."
"Please don't. I—I shall be seriously offended if you do. Let me arrange the business with your aunt. If you really want to see the piece, I suppose you must see it—but not unless your aunt likes."
"Dear, dearest, kindest uncle Oliver!" cried Christabel, squeezing his arm. "From my childhood upwards you have always fostered my self-will by the blindest indulgence. I was afraid that, all at once, you were going to be unkind and thwart me."
Major Bree was thoughtful and silent for the rest of the afternoon, and although Jessie tried to be as sharp-spoken and vivacious as usual, the effort would have been obvious to any two people properly qualified to observe the actions and expressions of others. But Angus and Christabel, being completely absorbed in each other, saw nothing amiss in their companions.
The river and the landscape were divine—a river for gods—a wood for nymphs—altogether too lovely for mortals. Tea, served on a little round table in the hotel garden, was perfect.
"How much nicer than the dinner to-night," exclaimed Christabel. "I wish we were not going. And yet, it will be very pleasant, I daresay—a table decorated with the loveliest flowers—well-dressed women, clever men, all talking as if there was not a care in life—and perhaps we shall be next each other," added the happy girl, looking at Angus.
"What a comfort for me that I am out of it," said Jessie. "How nice to be an insignificant young woman whom nobody ever dreams of asking to dinner. A powdered old dowager did actually hint at my going to her musical evening the other day when she called in Bolton Row. 'Be sure you come early,' she said, gushingly, to Mrs. Tregonell and Christabel; and then, in quite another key, glancing at me, she added, and 'if Miss—er—er would like to hear my singers I should be—er—delighted,' no doubt mentally adding, 'I hope she won't have the impertinence to take me at my word.'"
"Jessie, you are the most evil-thinking person I ever knew," cried Christabel. "I'm sure Lady Millamont meant to be civil."
"Yes, but she did not mean me to go to her party," retorted Jessie.
The happy days—the society evenings—slipped by—dining—music—dancing. And now came the brief bright season of rustic entertainments—more dancing—more music—lawn-tennis—archery—water parties—every device by which the summer hours may chime in tune with pleasure. It was July—Christabel's birthday had come and gone, bringing a necklace of single diamonds and a basket of June roses from Angus, and the most perfect thing in Park hacks from Mrs. Tregonell—but Christabel's wedding-day—more fateful than any birthday except the first—had not yet been fixed—albeit Mr. Hamleigh pressed for a decision upon this vital point.
"It was to have been at Midsummer," he said, one day, when he had been discussing the question tête-à-tête with Mrs. Tregonell.
"Indeed, Angus, I never said that. I told you that Christabel would be twenty at Midsummer, and that I would not consent to the marriage until after then."
"Precisely, but surely that meant soon after? I thought we should be married early in July—in time to start for the Tyrol in golden weather."
"I never had any fixed date in my mind," answered Mrs. Tregonell, with a pained look. Struggle with herself as she might, this engagement of Christabel's was a disappointment and a grief to her. "I thought my son would have returned before now. I should not like the wedding to take place in his absence."
"And I should like him to be at the wedding," said Angus; "but I think it will be rather hard if we have to wait for the caprice of a traveller who, from what Belle tells me of his letters——"
"Has Belle shown you any of his letters?" asked Mrs. Tregonell, with a vexed look.
"No, I don't think he has written to her, has he?"
"No, of course not; his letters are always addressed to me. He is a wretched correspondent."
"I was going to say, that, from what Belle tells me, your son's movements appear most uncertain, and it really does not seem worth while to wait."
"When the wedding-day is fixed, I will send him a message by the Atlantic cable. We must have him at the wedding."
Mr. Hamleigh did not see the necessity; but he was too kind to say so. He pressed for a settlement as to the day—or week—or at least the month in which his marriage was to take place—and at last Mrs. Tregonell consented to the beginning of September. They were all agreed now that the fittest marriage temple for this particular bride and bridegroom was the little old church in the heart of the hills—the church in which Christabel had worshipped every Sunday, morning or afternoon, ever since she could remember. It was Christabel's own desire to kneel before that familiar altar on her wedding-day—in the solemn peacefulness of that loved hill-side, with friendly honest country faces round her—rather than in the midst of a fashionable crowd, attended by bridesmaids after Gainsborough, and page-boys after Vandyke, in an atmosphere heavy with the scent of Ess Bouquet.
Mr. Hamleigh had no near relations—and albeit a whole bevy of cousins and a herd of men from the clubs would have gladly attended to witness his excision from the ranks of gilded youth, and to bid him God-speed on his voyage to the domestic haven—their presence at the sacrifice would have given him no pleasure—while, on the other hand, there was one person resident in London whose presence would have caused him acute pain. Thus, each of the lovers pleading for the same favour, Mrs. Tregonell had foregone her idea of a London wedding, and had come to see that it would be very hard upon all the kindly inhabitants of Forrabury and Minster—Boscastle—Trevalga—Bossiney and Trevena—to deprive them of the pleasurable excitement to be derived from Christabel's wedding.
Early in September, in the golden light of that lovely time, they were to be quietly married in the dear old church, and then away to Tyrolean woods and hills—scenes which, for Christabel, seemed to be the chosen background of poetry, legend, and romance, rather than an actual country, provided with hotels, and accessible by tourists. Once having consented to the naming of an exact time, Mrs. Tregonell felt there could be no withdrawal of her word. She telegraphed to Leonard, who was somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, with a chosen friend, a couple of English servants and three or four Canadians,—and who, were he so minded, could be home in a month—and having despatched this message she felt the last wrench had been endured. Nothing that could ever come afterwards—save death itself—could give her sharper pain.
"Poor Leonard," she replied; "it will break his heart."
In the years that were gone she had so identified herself with her son's hopes and schemes, had so projected her thoughts into his future—seeing him in her waking dreams as he would be in the days to come, a model squire, possessed of all his father's old-fashioned virtues, with a great deal of modern cleverness superadded, a proud and happy husband, the father of a noble race—she had kept this vision of the future in her mind so long, had dwelt upon it so fondly, had coloured it so brightly, that to forego it now, to say to herself "This thing was but a dream which I dreamed, and it can never be realized," was like relinquishing a part of her own life. She was a deeply religious woman, and if called upon to bear physical pain—to suffer the agonies of a slow, incurable illness—she would have suffered with the patience of a Christian martyr, saying to herself, as brave Dr. Arnold said in the agony of his sudden fatal malady, "Whom He loveth He chasteneth,"—but she could not surrender the day-dream of her life without bitterest repining. In all her love of Christabel, in all her careful education and moral training of the niece to whom she had been as a mother, there had been this leaven of selfishness. She had been rearing a wife for her son—such a wife as would be a man's better angel—a guiding, restraining, elevating principle, so interwoven with his life that he should never know himself in leading-strings—an influence so gently exercised that he should never suspect that he was influenced.
"Leonard has a noble heart and a fine manly character," the mother had often told herself; "but he wants the association of a milder nature than his own. He is just the kind of man to be guided and governed by a good wife—a wife who would obey his lightest wish, and yet rule him always for good."
She had seen how, when Leonard had been disposed to act unkindly or illiberally by a tenant, Christabel had been able to persuade him to kindness or generosity—how, when he had set his face against going to church, being minded to devote Sunday morning to the agreeable duty of cleaning a favourite gun, or physicking a favourite spaniel, or greasing a cherished pair of fishing-boots, Christabel had taken him there—how she had softened and toned down his small social discourtesies, checked his tendency to strong language—and, as it were, expurgated, edited, and amended him.
And having seen and rejoiced in this state of things, it was very hard to be told that another had won the wife she had moulded, after her own fashion, to be the gladness and glory of her son's life; all the harder because it was her own shortsighted folly which had brought Angus Hamleigh to Mount Royal.
All through that gay London season—for Christabel a time of unclouded sadness—carking care had been at Mrs. Tregonell's heart. She tried to be just to the niece whom she dearly loved, and who had so tenderly and fully repaid her affection. Yet she could not help feeling as if Christabel's choice was a personal injury—nay, almost treachery and ingratitude. "She must have known that I meant her to be my son's wife," she said to herself; "yet she takes advantage of my poor boy's absence, and gives herself to the first comer."
"Surely September is soon enough," she said, pettishly, when Angus pleaded for an earlier date. "You will not have known Christabel for a year, even then. Some men love a girl for half a lifetime before they win her."
"But it was not my privilege to know Christabel at the beginning of my life," replied Angus. "I made the most of my opportunities by loving her the moment I saw her."
"It is impossible to be angry with you," sighed Mrs. Tregonell. "You are so like your father."
That was one of the worst hardships of the case. Mrs. Tregonell could not help liking the man who had thwarted the dearest desire of her heart. She could not help admiring him, and making comparisons between him and Leonard—not to the advantage of her son. Had not her first love been given to his father—the girl's romantic love, ever so much more fervid and intense than any later passion—the love that sees ideal perfection in a lover?
In all the bright June weather, Christabel had been too busy and too happy to remember her caprice about Cupid and Psyche. But just after the Henley week—which to some thousands, and to these two lovers, had been as a dream of bliss—a magical mixture of sunlight and balmy airs and flowery meads, fine gowns and fine luncheons, nigger singers, stone-breaking athletes, gipsy sorceresses, eager to read high fortunes on any hand for half-a-crown, rowing men, racing men, artists, actors, poets, critics, swells—just after the wild excitement of that watery saturnalia, Mr. Hamleigh had occasion to go to the north of Scotland to see an ancient kinswoman of his father—an eccentric maiden aunt—who had stood for him, by proxy, at the baptismal font, and at the same time announced her intention of leaving him her comfortable fortune, together with all those snuff-mulls, quaighs, knives and forks, spoons, and other curiosities of Caledonia, which had been in the family for centuries—provided always that he grew up with a high opinion of Mary Stuart, and religiously believed the casket letters to be the vile forgeries of George Buchanan. The old lady, who was a kindly soul, with a broad Scotch tongue, had an inconvenient habit of sending for her nephew at odd times and seasons, when she imagined herself on the point of death—and he was too kind to turn a deaf ear to this oft-repeated cry of "wolf"—lest, after making light of her summons, he should hear that the real wolf had come and devoured the harmless, affectionate old lady.
So now, just when London life was at its gayest and brightest, when the moonlit city after midnight looked like fairy-land, and the Thames Embankment, with its long chain of glittering lamps, gleaming golden above the sapphire river, was a scene to dream about, Mr. Hamleigh had to order his portmanteau and a hansom, and drive from the Albany to one of the great railway stations in the Euston Road, and to curl himself up in his corner of the limited mail, scarcely to budge till he was landed at Inverness. It was hard to leave Christabel, though it were only for a week. He swore to her that his absence should not outlast a week, unless the grisly wolf called Death did indeed claim his victim.
"I know I shall find the dear old soul up and hearty," he said, lightly, "devouring Scotch collops, or haggis, or cock-a-leeky, or something equally loathsome, and offering me some of that extraordinary soup which she always talks of in the plural. 'Do have a few more broth, Angus; they're very good the day.' But she is a sweet old woman, despite her barbarities, and one of the happiest days of my life will be that on which I take you to see her."
"And if—if she is not very ill, you will come back soon, won't you, Angus," pleaded Christabel.
"As soon as ever I can tear myself away from the collops and the few broth. If I find the dear old impostor in rude health, as I quite expect, I will hob and nob with her over one glass of toddy, sleep one night under her roof, and then across the Border as fast as the express will carry me."
So they parted; and Angus had scarcely left Bolton Row an hour, when Major Bree came in, and, by some random flight of fancy, Christabel remembered "Cupid and Psyche."
The three ladies had just come upstairs after dinner. Mrs. Tregonell was enjoying forty winks in a low capacious chair, near an open window, in the first drawing-room, softly lit by shaded Carcel lamps, scented with tea-roses and stephanotis. Christabel and Jessie were in the tiny third room, where there was only the faint light of a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece. Here the Major found them, when he came creeping in from the front room, where he had refrained from disturbing Mrs. Tregonell.
"Auntie is asleep," said Christabel. "We must talk in subdued murmurs. She looked sadly tired after Mrs. Dulcimer's garden party."
"I ought not to have come so early," apologized the Major.
"Yes you ought; we are very glad to have you. It is dreadfully dull without Angus."
"What! you begin to miss him already?"
"Already!" echoed Christabel. "I missed him before the sound of his cab wheels was out of the street. I have been missing him ever since."
"Poor little Belle!"
"And he is not half-way to Scotland yet," she sighed. "How long and slow the hours will be. You must do all you can to amuse me. I shall want distractions—dissipation even. If we were at home I should go and wander up by Willapark, and talk to the gulls. Here there is nothing to do. Another stupid garden party at Twickenham to-morrow, exactly opposite the one to-day at Richmond—the only variety being that we shall be on the north bank of the river instead of the south bank—a prosy dinner in Regent's Park the day after. Let me see," said Christabel, suddenly animated. "We are quite free for to-morrow evening. We can go and see 'Cupid and Psyche,' and I can tell Angus all about it when he comes back. Please get us a nice see-able box, like a dear obliging Uncle Oliver, as you are."
"Of course I am obliging," groaned the Major, "but the most obliging person that ever was can't perform impossibilities. If you want a box at the Kaleidoscope you must engage one for to-morrow month—or to-morrow six weeks. It is a mere bandbox of a theatre, and everybody in London wants to see this farrago of nonsense illustrated by pretty women."
"You have seen it, I suppose."
"Yes, I dropped in one night with an old naval friend, who had taken a stall for his wife, which she was not able to occupy."
"Major Bree, you are a very selfish person," said Christabel, straightening her slim waist, and drawing herself up with mock dignity. "You have seen this play yourself, and you are artful enough to tell us it is not worth seeing, just to save yourself the trouble of hunting for a box. Uncle Oliver, that is not chivalry. I used to think you were a chivalrous person."
"Is there anything improper in the play?" asked Jessie, striking in with her usual bluntness—never afraid to put her thoughts into speech. "Is that your reason for not wishing Christabel to see it?"
"No, the piece is perfectly correct," stammered the Major, "there is not a word——"
"Then I think Belle's whim ought to be indulged," said Jessie, "especially as Mr. Hamleigh's absence makes her feel out of spirits."
The Major murmured something vague about the difficulty of getting places with less than six weeks' notice, whereupon Christabel told him, with a dignified air, that he need not trouble himself any further.
But a young lady who has plenty of money, and who has been accustomed, while dutiful and obedient to her elders, to have her own way in all essentials, is not so easily satisfied as the guileless Major supposed. As soon as the West-end shops were open next morning, before the jewellers had set out their dazzling wares—those diamond parures and rivières, which are always inviting the casual lounger to step in and buy them—those goodly chased claret jugs, and Queen Anne tea-kettles, and mighty venison dishes, which seem to say, this is an age of luxury, and we are indispensable to a gentleman's table—before those still more attractive shops which deal in hundred-guinea dressing-cases, jasper inkstands, ormolu paper-weights, lapis lazuli blotting-books, and coral powder-boxes—had laid themselves out for the tempter's work—Miss Courtenay and Miss Bridgeman, in their neat morning attire, were tripping from library to library, in quest of a box at the Kaleidoscope for that very evening.
They found what they wanted in Bond Street. Lady Somebody had sent back her box by a footman, just ten minutes ago, on account of Lord Somebody's attack of gout. The librarian could have sold it were it fifty boxes, and at a fabulous price, but he virtuously accepted four guineas, which gave him a premium of only one guinea for his trouble—and Christabel went home rejoicing.
"It will be such fun to show the Major that we are cleverer than he," she said to Jessie.
Miss Bridgeman was thoughtful, and made no reply to this remark. She was pondering the Major's conduct in this small matter, and it seemed to her that he must have some hidden reason for wishing Christabel not to see "Cupid and Psyche." That he, who had so faithfully waited upon all their fancies, taking infinite trouble to give them pleasure, could in this matter be disobliging or indifferent seemed hardly possible. There must be a reason; and yet what reason could there be to taboo a piece which the Major distinctly declared to be correct, and which all the fashionable world went to see? "Perhaps there is something wrong with the drainage of the theatre," Jessie thought, speculating vaguely—a suspicion of typhoid fever, which the Major had shrunk from mentioning, out of respect for feminine nerves.
"Did you ever tell Mr. Hamleigh you wanted to see 'Cupid and Psyche'?" asked Miss Bridgeman at last, sorely exercised in spirit—fearful lest Christabel was incurring some kind of peril by her persistence.
"Yes, I told him; but it was at a time when we had a good many engagements, and I think he forgot all about it. Hardly like Angus, was it, to forget one's wishes, when he is generally so eager to anticipate them?"
"A strange coincidence!" thought Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh and the Major had been unanimous in their neglect of this particular fancy of Christabel's.
At luncheon Miss Courtenay told her aunt the whole story—how Major Bree had been most disobliging, and how she had circumvented him.
"And my revenge will be to make him sit out 'Cupid and Psyche' for the second time," she said, lightly, "for he must be our escort. You will go, of course, dearest, to please me?"
"My pet, you know how the heat of a theatre always exhausts me!" pleaded Mrs. Tregonell, whose health, long delicate, had been considerably damaged by her duties as chaperon. "When you are going anywhere with Angus, I like to be seen with you; but to-night, with the Major and Jessie, I shall not be wanted. I can enjoy an evening's rest."
"But do you enjoy that long, blank evening, Auntie?" asked Christabel, looking anxiously at her aunt's somewhat careworn face. People who have one solitary care make so much of it, nurse and fondle it, as if it were an only child. "Once or twice when we have let you have your own way and stay at home, you have looked so pale and melancholy when we came back, as if you had been brooding upon sad thoughts all the evening."
"Sad thoughts will come, Belle."
"They ought not to come to you, Auntie. What cause have you for sadness?"
"I have a dear son far away, Belle—don't you think that is cause enough?"
"A son who enjoys the wild sports of the West ever so much better than he enjoys his home; but who will settle down by-and-by into a model country Squire."
"I doubt that, Christabel. I don't think he will ever settle down—now."
There was an emphasis—an almost angry emphasis—upon the last word which told Christabel only too plainly what her aunt meant. She could guess what disappointment it was that her aunt sighed over in the long, lonely evenings; and, albeit the latent resentfulness in Mrs. Tregonell's mind was an injustice, her niece could not help being sorry for her.
"Yes, dearest, he will—he will," she said, resolutely. "He will have his fill of shooting bisons, and all manner of big and small game, out yonder; and he will come home, and marry some good sweet girl, who will love you only just a little less than I do, and he will be the last grand example of the old-fashioned country Squire—a race fast dying out; and he will be as much respected as if the power of the Norman Botterells still ruled in the land, and he had the right of dealing out high-handed justice, and immuring his fellow-creatures in a dungeon under his drawing-room."
"I would rather you would not talk about him," answered the widow, gloomily; "you turn everything into a joke. You forget that in my uncertainty about his fate, every thought of him is fraught with pain."
Belle hung her head, and the meal ended in silence. After luncheon came dressing, and then the drive to Twickenham, with Major Bree in attendance. Christabel told him of her success as they drove through the Park to Kensington.
"I have the pleasure to invite you to a seat in my box at the Kaleidoscope this evening," she said.
"What box?"
"A box which Jessie and I secured this morning, before you had finished your breakfast."
"A box for this evening?"
"For this evening."
"I wonder you care to go to a theatre without Hamleigh."
"It is very cruel of you to say that!" exclaimed Christabel, her eyes brightening with girlish tears, which her pride checked before they could fall. "You ought to know that I am wretched without him—and that I want to lose the sense of my misery in dreamland. The theatre for me is what opium was for Coleridge and De Quincey."
"I understand," said Major Bree; "'you are not merry, but you do beguile the thing you are by seeming otherwise.'"
"You will go with us?"
"Of course, if Mrs. Tregonell does not object."
"I shall be very grateful to you for taking care of them," answered the dowager languidly, as she leant back in her carriage—a fine example of handsome middle-age: gracious, elegant, bearing every mark of good birth, yet with a worn look, as of one for whom fading beauty and decline of strength would come too swiftly. "I know I shall be tired to death when we get back to town."
"I don't think London society suits you so well as the monotony of Mount Royal," said Major Bree.
"No; but I am glad Christabel has had her first season. People have been extremely kind. I never thought we should have so many invitations."
"You did not know that beauty is the ace of trumps in the game of society."
The garden party was as other parties of the same genus: strawberry ices and iced coffee in a tent under a spreading Spanish chestnut—music and recitations in a drawing-room, with many windows looking upon the bright swift river—and the picturesque roofs of Old Richmond—just that one little picturesque group of bridge and old tiled-gables which still remains—fine gowns, fine talk; a dash of the æsthetic element; strange colours, strange forms and fashions; pretty girls in grandmother bonnets; elderly women in limp Ophelia gowns, with tumbled frills and lank hair. Christabel and the Major walked about the pretty garden, and criticized all the eccentricities, she glad to keep aloof from her many admirers—safe under the wing of a familiar friend.
"Five o'clock," she said; "that makes twenty-four hours. Do you think he will be back to-morrow?"
"He? Might I ask whom you mean by that pronoun?"
"Angus. His telegram this morning said that his aunt was really ill—not in any danger—but still quite an invalid, and that he would be obliged to stay a little longer than he had hoped might be needful, in order to cheer her. Do you think he will be able to come back to-morrow?"
"Hardly, I fear. Twenty-four hours would be a very short time for the cheering process. I think you ought to allow him a week. Did you answer his telegram?"
"Why, of course! I told him how miserable I was without him; but that he must do whatever was right and kind for his aunt. I wrote him a long letter before luncheon to the same effect. But, oh, I hope the dear old lady will get well very quickly!"
"If usquebaugh can mend her, no doubt the recovery will be rapid," answered the Major, laughing. "I dare say that is why you are so anxious for Hamleigh's return. You think if he stays in the North he may become a confirmed toddy-drinker. By-the-by, when his return is so uncertain, do you think it is quite safe for you to go to the theatre to-night? He might come to Bolton Row during your absence."
"That is hardly possible," said Christabel. "But even if such a happy thing should occur, he would come and join us at the Kaleidoscope."
This was the Major's last feeble and futile effort to prevent a wilful woman having her own way. They rejoined Mrs. Tregonell, and went back to their carriage almost immediately—were in Bolton Row in time for a seven o'clock dinner, and were seated in the box at the Kaleidoscope a few minutes after eight. The Kaleidoscope was one of the new theatres which have been added to the attractions of London during the last twenty years. It was a small house, and of exceeding elegance; the inspiration of the architect thereof seemingly derived rather from thebonbonnièresof Siraudin and Boissier than from the severer exemplars of high art. Somebody said it was a theatre which looked as if it ought to be filled with glacé chestnuts, or crystallized violets, rather than with substantial flesh and blood. The draperies thereof were of palest dove-coloured poplin and cream-white satin; the fauteuils were upholstered in velvet of the same dove colour, with a monogram in dead gold; the pilasters and mouldings were of the slenderest and most delicate order—no heavy masses of gold or colour—all airy, light, graceful; the sweeping curve of the auditorium was in itself a thing of beauty: every fold of the voluminous dove-coloured curtain, lined with crimson satin—which flashed among the dove tints here and there, like a gleam of vivid colour in the breast of a tropical bird—was a study. The front of the house was lighted with old-fashioned wax candles, a recurrence to obsolete fashion which reminded the few survivors of the D'Orsay period of Her Majesty's in the splendid days of Pasta and Malibran, and which delighted the Court and Livery of the Tallow Chandlers' Company.
"What a lovely theatre!" cried Christabel, looking round the house, which was crowded with a brilliant audience; "and how cruel of you not to bring us here! It is the prettiest theatre we have seen yet."
"Yes; it's a nice little place," said the Major, feebly; "but, you see, they've been playing the same piece all the season—no variety."
"What did that matter, when we had not seen the piece? Besides, a young man I danced with told me he had been to see it fifteen times."
"That young man was an ass!" grumbled the Major.
"Well, I can't help thinking so too," assented Christabel. And then the overture began—a dreamy, classical compound, made up of reminiscences of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber—a melodious patchwork, dignified by scientific orchestration. Christabel listened dreamily to the dreamy music, thinking of Angus all the while—wondering what he was doing in the far-away Scottish land, which she knew only from Sir Walter's novels.
The dove-coloured curtains were drawn apart to a strain of plaintive sweetness, and the play—half poem, half satire—began. The scene was a palace garden, in some "unsuspected isle in far-off seas." The personages were Psyche, her sisters, and the jealous goddess, whose rest had been disturbed by rumours of an earthly beauty which surpassed her own divine charms, and who approached the palace disguised as a crone, dealing in philters and simples, ribbons and perfumes, a kind of female Autolycus.
First came a dialogue between Venus and the elder sisters—handsome women both, but of a coarse type of beauty, looking too large for the frame in which they appeared. Christabel and Jessie enjoyed the smartness of the dialogue, which sparkled with Aristophanian hits at the follies of the hour, and yet had a poetical grace which seemed the very flavour of the old Greek world.
At last, after the interest of the fable had fairly begun, there rose the faint melodious breathings of a strange music within the palace—the quaint and primitive harmonies of a three-stringed lyre—and Psyche came slowly down the marble steps, a slender, gracious figure in classic drapery—Canova's statue incarnate.
"Very pretty face," muttered the Major, looking at her through his opera-glass; "but no figure."
The slim, willowy form, delicately and lightly moulded as a young fawn's, was assuredly of a type widely different from the two young women of the fleshly school who represented Psyche's jealous sisters. In their case there seemed just enough mind to keep those sleek, well-favoured bodies in motion. In Stella Mayne the soul, or, at any rate, an ethereal essence, a vivid beauty of expression, an electric brightness, which passes for the soul, so predominated over the sensual, that it would have scarcely surprised one if this fragile butterfly-creature had verily spread a pair of filmy wings and floated away into space. The dark liquid eyes, the small chiselled features, exquisitely Greek, were in most perfect harmony with the character. Amongst the substantial sensuous forms of her companions this Psyche moved like a being from the spirit world.
"Oh!" cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, "how perfectly lovely!"
"Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?" muttered the Major, tugging at his grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious Psyche from his lurking place at the back of the box.
"Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem."
Jessie Bridgeman said nothing. She had looked straight from Psyche to the Major, as he grunted out his acquiescence, and the troubled expression of his face troubled her. It was plain to her all in a moment that his objection to the Kaleidoscope Theatre was really an objection to Psyche. Yet what harm could that lovely being on the stage, even were she the worst and vilest of her sex, do to any one so remote from her orbit as Christabel Courtenay?
The play went on. Psyche spoke her graceful lines with a perfect intonation. Nature had in this case not been guilty of cruel inconsistency. The actress's voice was as sweet as her face; every movement was harmonious; every look lovely. She was not a startling actress; nor was there any need of great acting in the part that had been written for her. She was Psyche—the loved, the loving, pursued by jealousy, persecuted by women's unwomanly hatred, afflicted, despairing—yet loving always; beautiful in every phase of her gentle life.
"Do you like the play?" asked the Major, grimly, when the curtain had fallen on the first act.
"I never enjoyed anything so much! It is so different from all other plays we have seen," said Christabel; "and Psyche—Miss Stella Mayne, is she not—is the loveliest creature I ever saw in my life."
"You must allow a wide margin for stage make-up, paint and powder, and darkened lashes," grumbled the Major.
"But I have been studying her face through my glass. It is hardly at all made up. Just compare it with the faces of the two sisters, which are like china plates, badly fired. Jessie, what are you dreaming about? You haven't a particle of enthusiasm! Why don't you say something?"
"I don't want to be an echo," said Miss Bridgeman, curtly. "I could only repeat what you are saying. I can't be original enough to say that Miss Mayne is ugly."
"She is simply the loveliest creature we have seen on the stage or off it," exclaimed Christabel, who was too rustic to want to know who Miss Mayne was, and where the manager had discovered such a pearl, as a London playgoer might have done.
"Hark!" said Jessie; "there's a knock at the door."
Christabel's heart began to beat violently. Could it be Angus? No, it was more likely to be some officious person, offering ices.
It was neither; but a young man of the languid-elegant type—one of Christabel's devoted admirers, the very youth who had told her of his having seen "Cupid and Psyche," fifteen times.
"Why this makes the sixteenth time," she said, smiling at him as they shook hands.
"I think it is nearer the twentieth," he replied; "it is quite the jolliest piece in London! Don't you agree with me?"
"I think it is—remarkably—jolly!" answered Christabel, laughing. "What odd words you have in London for the expression of your ideas—and so few of them!"
"A kind of short-hand," said the Major, "arbitrary characters. Jolly means anything you like—awful means anything you like. That kind of language gives the widest scope for the exercise of the imagination."
"How is Mrs. Tregonell?" asked the youth, not being given to the discussion of abstract questions, frivolous or solemn. He had a mind which could only grasp life in the concrete—an intellect that required to deal with actualities—people, coats, hats, boots, dinner, park-hack—just as little children require actual counters to calculate with.
He subsided into a chair behind Miss Courtenay, and, the box being a large one, remained there for the rest of the play—to the despair of a companion youth in the stalls, who looked up ever and anon, vacuous and wondering, and who resembled his friend as closely as a well-matched carriage-horse resembles his fellow—grooming and action precisely similar.
"What brilliant diamonds!" said Christabel, noticing a collet necklace which Psyche wore in the second act, and which was a good deal out of harmony with her Greek drapery—not by any means resembling those simple golden ornaments which patient Dr. Schliemann and his wife dug out of the hill at Hissarlik. "But, of course, they are only stage jewels," continued Christabel; "yet they sparkle as brilliantly as diamonds of the first water."
"Very odd, but so they do," muttered young FitzPelham, behind her shoulder; and then,sotto voceto the Major, he said—"that's the worst of giving these women jewels, theywillwear them."
"And that emerald butterfly on her shoulder," pursued Christabel; "one would suppose it were real."
"A real butterfly?"
"No, real emeralds."
"It belonged to the Empress of the French, and was sold for three hundred and eighty guineas at Christie's," said FitzPelham; whereupon Major Bree's substantial boot came down heavily on the youth's Queen Anne shoe. "At least, the Empress had one like it," stammered FitzPelham, saying to himself, in his own vernacular, that he had "hoofed it."
"How do you like Stella Mayne?" he asked by-and-by, when the act was over.
"I am charmed with her. She is the sweetest actress I ever saw; not the greatest—there are two or three who far surpass her in genius; but there is a sweetness—a fascination. I don't wonder she is the rage. I only wonder Major Bree could have deprived me of the pleasure of seeing her all this time."
"You could stand the piece a second time, couldn't you?"
"Certainly—or a third time. It is so poetical—it carries one into a new world!"
"Pretty foot and ankle, hasn't she?" murmured FitzPelham—to which frivolous comment Miss Courtenay made no reply.
Her soul was rapt in the scene before her—the mystic wood whither Psyche had now wandered with her divine lover. The darkness of a summer night in the Greek Archipelago—fire-flies flitting athwart ilex and olive bushes—a glimpse of the distant starlit sea.
Here—goaded by her jealous sisters to a fatal curiosity—Psyche stole with her lamp to the couch of her sleeping lover, gazing spell-bound upon that godlike countenance—represented in actual flesh by a chubby round face and round brown eyes—and in her glad surprise letting fall a drop of oil from her lamp on Cupid's winged shoulder—whereon the god leaves her, wounded by her want of faith. Had he not told her they must meet only in the darkness, and that she must never seek to know his name? So ends the second act of the fairy drama. In the third, poor Psyche is in ignoble bondage—a slave to Venus, in the goddess's Palace at Cythera—a fashionable, fine-lady Venus, who leads her gentle handmaiden a sorry life, till the god of love comes to her rescue. And here, in the tiring chamber of the goddess, the playwright makes sport of all the arts by which modern beauty is manufactured. Here poor Psyche—tearful, despairing—has to toil at the creation of the Queen of Beauty, whose charms of face and figure are discovered to be all falsehood, from the topmost curl of her toupet to the arched instep under her jewelled buskin. Throughout this scene Psyche alternates between smiles and tears; and then at the last Cupid appears—claims his mistress, defies his mother, and the happy lovers, linked in each other's arms, float skyward on a shaft of lime-light. And so the graceful mythic drama ends—fanciful from the first line to the last, gay and lightly touched as burlesque, yet with an element of poetry which burlesque for the most part lacks.
Christabel's interest had been maintained throughout the performance.
"How extraordinarily silent you have been all the evening, Jessie!" she said, as they were putting on their cloaks; "surely, you like the play!"
"I like it pretty well. It is rather thin, I think; but then, perhaps, that is because I have 'Twelfth Night' still in my memory, as we heard Mr. Brandram recite it last week at Willis's Rooms."
"Nobody expects modern comedy to be as good as Shakespeare," retorted Christabel; "you might as well find fault with the electric light for not being quite equal to the moon. Don't you admire that exquisite creature?"
"Which of them?" asked Jessie, stolidly, buttoning her cloak.
"Which of them! Oh, Jessie, you have generally such good taste. Why, Miss Mayne, of course. It is almost painful to look at the others. They are such common earthy creatures, compared with her!"
"I have no doubt she is very wonderful—and she is the fashion, which goes for a great deal," answered Miss Bridgeman; but never a word in praise of Stella Mayne could Christabel extort from her. She—who, educated by Shepherd's Bush and poverty, was much more advanced in knowledge of evil than the maiden from beyond Tamar—suspected that some sinister influence was to be feared in Stella Mayne. Why else had the Major so doggedly opposed their visit to this particular theatre? Why else did he look so glum when Stella Mayne was spoken about?
The next day but one was Thursday—an afternoon upon which Mrs. Tregonell was in the habit of staying at home to receive callers, and a day on which her small drawing-rooms were generally filled with more or less pleasant people—chiefly of the fairer sex—from four to six. The three rooms—small by degrees and beautifully less—the old-fashioned furniture and profusion of choicest flowers—lent themselves admirably to gossip and afternoon tea, and were even conducive to mild flirtation, for there was generally a sprinkling of young men of the FitzPelham type—having nothing particular to say, but always faultless in their dress, and well-meaning as to their manners.
On this afternoon—which to Christabel seemed a day of duller hue and colder atmosphere than all previous Thursdays, on account of Angus Hamleigh's absence—there were rather more callers than usual. The season was ripening towards its close. Some few came to pay their last visit, and to inform Mrs. Tregonell and her niece about their holiday movements—generally towards the Engadine or some German Spa—the one spot of earth to which their constitution could accommodate itself at this time of year.
"I am obliged to go to Pontresina before the end of July," said a ponderous middle-aged matron to Miss Courtenay. "I can't breathe any where else in August and September."
"I think you would find plenty of air at Boscastle," said Christabel, smiling at her earnestness; "but I dare say the Engadine is very nice!"
"Five thousand feet above the level of the sea," said the matron proudly.
"I like to be a little nearer the sea—to see it—and smell it—and feel its spray upon my face," answered Christabel. "Do you take your children with you?"
"Oh, no, they all go to Ramsgate with the governess and a maid."
"Poor little things! And how sad for you to know that there are all those mountain passes—a three days' journey—between you and your children."
"Yes, it is very trying!" sighed the mother; "but they are so fond of Ramsgate; and the Engadine is the only place that suits me."
"You have never been to Chagford?"
"Chagford! No; what is Chagford?"
"A village upon the edge of Dartmoor—all among the Devonshire hills. People go there for the fine bracing air. I can't help thinking it must do them almost as much good as the Engadine."
"Indeed! I have heard that Devonshire is quite too lovely," said the matron, who would have despised herself had she been familiar with her native land. "But what have you done with Mr. Hamleigh? I am quite disappointed at not seeing him this afternoon."
"He is in Scotland," said Christabel, and then went on to tell as much as was necessary about her lover's journey to the North.
"How dreadfully dull you must be without him!" said the lady, sympathetically, and several other ladies—notably a baronet's widow, who had been a friend of Mrs. Tregonell's girlhood—a woman who never said a kind word of anybody, yet was invited everywhere, and who had the reputation of giving a better dinner, on a small scale, than any other lonely woman in London. The rest were young women, mostly of the gushing type, who were prepared to worship Christabel because she was pretty, an heiress, and engaged to a man of some distinction in their particular world. They had all clustered round Mrs. Tregonell and her niece, in the airy front drawing-room, while Miss Bridgeman poured out tea at a Japanese table in the middle room, waited upon sedulously by Major Bree, Mr. FitzPelham, and another youth, a Somerset House young man, who wrote for the Society papers—or believed that he did, on the strength of having had an essay on "Tame Cats" accepted in the big gooseberry season—and gave himself to the world as a person familiar with the undercurrents of literary and dramatic life. The ladies made a circle round Mrs. Tregonell, and these three gentlemen, circulating with tea-cups, sugar-basins, and cream-pots, joined spasmodically in the conversation.
Christabel owned to finding a certain emptiness in life without her lover. She did not parade her devotion to him, but was much too unaffected to pretend indifference.
"We went to the theatre on Tuesday night," she said.
"Oh, how could you!" cried the oldest and most gushing of the three young ladies. "Without Mr. Hamleigh?"
"That was our chief reason for going. We knew we should be dull without him. We went to the Kaleidoscope, and were delighted with Psyche."
All three young ladies gushed in chorus. Stella Mayne was quite too lovely—a poem, a revelation, and so on, and so on. Lady Cumberbridge, the baronet's widow, pursed her lips and elevated her eyebrows, which, on a somewhat modified form, resembled Lord Thurlow's, but said nothing. The Somerset House young man stole a glance at FitzPelham, and smiled meaningly; but the amiable FitzPelham was only vacuous.
"Of course you have seen this play," said Mrs. Tregonell, turning to Lady Cumberbridge. "You see everything, I know?"
"Yes; I make it my business to see everything—good, bad, and indifferent," answered the strong-minded dowager, in a voice which would hardly have shamed the Lord Chancellor's wig, which those Thurlow-like eyebrows so curiously suggested. "It is the sole condition upon which London life is worth living. If one only saw the good things, one would spend most of one's evening at home, and we don't leave our country places forthat. I see a good deal that bores me, an immense deal that disgusts me, and a little—a very little—that I can honestly admire."
"Then I am sure you must admire 'Cupid and Psyche,'" said Christabel.
"My dear, that piece, which I am told has brought a fortune to the management, is just one of the things that I don't care to talk about before young people. I look upon it as the triumph of vice: and I wonder—yes,verymuch wonder—thatyouwere allowed to see it."
There was an awfulness about the dowager's tone as she uttered these final sentences, which out-Thurlowed Thurlow. Christabel shivered, hardly knowing why, but heartily wishing there had been no such person as Lady Cumberbridge among her aunt's London acquaintance.
"But, surely there is nothing improper in the play, dear Lady Cumberbridge," exclaimed the eldest gusher, too long in society to shrink from sifting any question of that kind.
"There is a great deal that is improper," replied the dowager, sternly.
"Surely not in the language: that is too lovely?" urged the gusher. "I must be very dense, I'm afraid, for I really did not see anything objectionable."
"You must be very blind, as well as dense, if you didn't see Stella Mayne's diamonds," retorted the dowager.
"Oh, of course I saw the diamonds. One could not help seeing them."
"And do you think there is nothing improper in those diamonds, or their history?" demanded Lady Cumberbridge, glaring at the damsel from under those terrific eyebrows. "If so, you must be less experienced in the ways of the world than I gave you credit for being. But I think I said before that this is a question which I donotcare to discuss before young people—even advanced as young people are in their ways and opinions now-a-days."
The maiden blushed at this reproof; and the conversation, steered judiciously by Mrs. Tregonell, glided on to safer topics. Yet calmly as that lady bore herself, and carefully as she managed to keep the talk among pleasant ways for the next half-hour, her mind was troubled not a little by the things that had been said about Stella Mayne. There had been a curious significance in the dowager's tone when she expressed surprise at Christabel having been allowed to see this play. That significant tone, in conjunction with Major Bree's marked opposition to Belle's wish upon this one matter, argued that there was some special reason why Belle should not see this actress. Mrs. Tregonell, like all quiet people, very observant, had seen the Somerset House young man's meaning smile as the play was mentioned. What was this peculiar something which all these people had in their minds? and of which she, Christabel's aunt, to whom the girl's welfare and happiness were vital, knew nothing.
She determined to take the most immediate and direct way of knowing all that was to be known, by questioning that peripatetic chronicle of fashionable scandal, Lady Cumberbridge. This popular personage knew a great deal more than the Society papers, and was not constrained like those prints to disguise her knowledge in Delphic hints and dark sayings. Lady Cumberbridge, like John Knox, never feared the face of man, and could be as plain-spoken and as coarse as she pleased.
"I should so like to have a few words with you by-and-by, if you don't mind waiting till these girls are gone," murmured Mrs. Tregonell.
"Very well, my dear; get rid of them as soon as you can, for I've some people coming to dinner, and I want an hour's sleep before I put on my gown."
The little assembly dispersed within the next quarter of an hour, and Christabel joined Jessie in the smaller drawing-room.
"You can shut the folding-doors, Belle," said Mrs. Tregonell, carelessly. "You and Jessie are sure to be chattering; and I want a quiet talk with Lady Cumberbridge."
Christabel obeyed, wondering a little what the quiet talk would be about, and whether by any chance it would touch upon the play last night. She, too, had been struck by the significance of the dowager's tone; and then it was so rarely that she found herself excluded from any conversation in which her aunt had part.
"Now," said Mrs. Tregonell, directly the doors were shut, "I want to know why Christabel should not have been allowed to see that play the other night?"
"What!" cried Lady Cumberbridge, "don't you know why?"
"Indeed no. I did not go with them, so I had no opportunity of judging as to the play."
"My dear soul," exclaimed the deep voice of the dowager, "it is not the play—the play is well enough—it is the woman! And do you really mean to tell me that you don't know?"
"That I don't know what?"
"Stella Mayne's history?"
"What should I know of her more than of any other actress? They are all the same to me, like pictures, which I admire or not, from the outside. I am told that some are women of fashion who go everywhere, and that it is a privilege to know them; and that some one ought hardly to speak about, though one may go to see them; while there are others——"
"Who hover like stars between two worlds," said Lady Cumberbridge. "Yes, that's all true. And nobody has told you anything about Stella Mayne?"
"No one!"
"Then I'm very sorry I mentioned her name to you. I dare say you will hate me if I tell you the truth: people always do; because, in point of fact, truth is generally hateful. We can't afford to live up to it."
"I shall be grateful to you if you will tell me all that there is to be told about this actress, who seems in some way to be concerned——"
"In your niece's happiness? Well, no, my dear, we will hope not. It is all a thing of the past. Your friends have been remarkably discreet. It is really extraordinary that you should have heard nothing about it; but, on reflection, I think it is really better you should know the fact. Stella Mayne is the young woman for whom Mr. Hamleigh nearly ruined himself three years ago."
Mrs. Tregonell turned white as death.
Her mind had not been educated to the acceptance of sin and folly as a natural element in a young man's life. In her view of mankind the good men were all Bayards—fearless, stainless; the bad were a race apart, to be shunned by all good women. To be told that her niece's future husband—the man for whose sake her whole scheme of life had been set aside, the man whom Christabel and she had so implicitly trusted—was a fashionable libertine—the lover of an actress—the talk of the town—was a revelation that changed the whole colour of life.
"Are you sure that this is true?" she asked, falteringly.
"My dear creature, do I ever say anything that isn't true? There is no need to invent things. God knows the things people do are bad enough, and wild enough, to supply conversation for everybody. But this about Hamleigh and Stella Mayne is as well known as the Albert Memorial. He was positively infatuated about her; took her off the stage: she was in the back row of the ballet at Drury Lane, salary seventeen and sixpence a week. He lived with her in Italy for a year; then they came back to England, and he gave her a house in St. John's Wood; squandered his money upon her; had her educated; worshipped her, in fact; and, I am told, would have married her, if she had only behaved herself. Fortunately, these women never do behave themselves: they show the cloven-foot too soon;ourpeople only go wrong after marriage. But I hope, my dear, you will not allow yourself to be worried by this business. It is all a thing of the past, and Hamleigh will make just as good a husband as if it had never happened; better, perhaps, for he will be all the more able to appreciate a pure-minded girl like your niece."
Mrs. Tregonell listened with a stony visage. She was thinking of Leonard—Leonard who had never done wrong, in this way, within his mother's knowledge—who had been cheated out of his future wife by a flashy trickster—a man who talked like a poet, and who yet had given his first passionate love, and the best and brightest years of his life to a stage-dancer.
"How long is it since Mr. Hamleigh has ceased to be devoted to Miss Mayne?" she asked, in a cold, dull voice.
"I cannot say exactly: one hears so many different stories; there were paragraphs in the Society papers last season: 'A certain young sprig of fashion, a general favourite, whose infatuation for a well-known actress has been a matter of regret among thehaute volée, is said to have broken his bonds. The lady keeps her diamonds, and threatens to publish his letters,' and so on, and so forth. You know the kind of thing?"
"I do not," said Mrs. Tregonell. "I have never taken any interest in such paragraphs."
"Ah! that is the consequence of vegetating at the fag-end of England: all the pungency is taken out of life for you."
Mrs. Tregonell asked no further questions. She had made up her mind that any more detailed information, which she might require, must be obtained from another channel. She did not want this battered woman of the world to know how hard she was hit. Yes—albeit there was a far-off gleam of light amidst this darkness—she was profoundly hurt by the knowledge of Angus Hamleigh's wrong-doing. He had made himself very dear to her—dear from the tender association of the past—dear for his own sake. She had believed him a man of scrupulous honour, of pure and spotless life. Perhaps she had taken all this for granted, in her rustic simplicity, seeing that all his ideas and instincts were those of a gentleman. She had made no allowance for the fact that the will-o'-the-wisp, passionate love, may lure even a gentleman into swampy ground; and that his sole superiority over profligates of coarser clay will be to behave himself like a gentleman in those morasses whither an errant fancy has beguiled him.
"I hope you will not let this influence your feelings towards Mr. Hamleigh," said Lady Cumberbridge; "if you did so, I should really feel sorry for having told you. But you must inevitably have heard the story from somebody else before long."
"No doubt. I suppose everybody knows it."
"Why yes, it was tolerably notorious. They used to be seen everywhere together. Mr. Hamleigh seemed proud of his infatuation, and there were plenty of men in his own set to encourage him. Modern society has adopted Danton's motto, don't you know?—de l'audace, encore de l'audace et toujours de l'audace!And now I must go and get my siesta, or I shall be as stupid as an owl all the evening. Good-bye."
Mrs. Tregonell sat like a statue, absorbed in thought, for a considerable time after Lady Cumberbridge's departure. What was she to do? This horrid story was true, no doubt. Major Bree would be able to confirm it presently, when he came back to dinner, as he had promised to come. What was she to do? Allow the engagement to go on?—allow an innocent and pure-minded girl to marry a man whose infatuation for an actress had been town talk; who had come to Mount Royal fresh from that evil association—wounded to the core, perhaps, by the base creature's infidelity—and seeking consolation wherever it might offer; bringing his second-hand feelings, with all the bloom worn off them, to the shrine of innocent young beauty!—dedicating the mere ashes of burned-out fires to the woman who was to be his wife; perhaps even making scornful comparisons between her simple rustic charms and the educated fascinations of the actress; bringing her the leavings of a life—the mere dregs of youth's wine-cup! Was Christabel to be permitted to continue under this shameful delusion—to believe that she was receiving all when she was getting nothing? No!—ten thousand times, no! It was womanhood's stern duty to come to the rescue of guileless, too-trusting girlhood. Bitter as the ordeal must needs be for both, Christabel must be told the whole cruel truth. Then it would be for her own heart to decide. She would still be a free agent. But surely her own purity of feeling would teach her to decide rightly—to renounce the lover who had so fooled and cheated her—and, perhaps, later to reward the devotion of that other adorer who had loved her from boyhood upwards with a steady unwavering affection—chiefly demonstrated by the calm self-assured manner in which he had written of Christabel—in his letters to his mother—as his future wife, the possibility of her rejection of that honour never having occurred to his rustic intelligence.
Christabel peeped in through the half-opened door.
"Well, Aunt Di, is your conference over? Has her ladyship gone?"
"Yes, dear; I am trying to coax myself to sleep," answered Mrs. Tregonell from the depths of her armchair.
"Then I'll go and dress for dinner. Ah, how I only wish there were a chance of Angus coming back to-night!" sighed Christabel, softly closing the door.
Major Bree came in ten minutes afterwards.
"Come here, and sit by my side," said Mrs. Tregonell. "I want to talk to you seriously."
The Major complied, feeling far from easy in his mind.
"How pale you look!" he said; "is there anything wrong?"
"Yes—everything is wrong! You have treated me very badly. You have been false to me and to Christabel!"
"That is rather a wide accusation," said the Major, calmly. He knew perfectly what was coming, and that he should require all his patience—all that sweetness of temper which had been his distinction through life—in order to leaven the widow's wrath against the absent. "Perhaps, you won't think it too much trouble to explain the exact nature of my offence?"
Mrs. Tregonell told him Lady Cumberbridge's story.
"Did you, or did you not, know this last October?" she asked.
"I had heard something about it when I was in London two years before."
"And you did not consider it your duty to tell me?"
"Certainly not. I told you at the time, when I came back from town, that your young protégé's life had been a trifle wild. Miss Bridgeman remembered the fact, and spoke of it the night Hamleigh came to Mount Royal. When I saw how matters were going with Belle and Hamleigh, I made it my business to question him, considering myself Belle's next friend; and he assured me, as between man and man, that the affair with Stella Mayne was over—that he had broken with her formally and finally. From first to last I believe he acted wonderfully well in the business."
"Acted well!—acted well, to be the avowed lover of such a woman!—to advertise his devotion to her—associate his name with hers irrevocably—for you know that the world never forgets these alliances—and then to come to Mount Royal, and practise upon our provincial ignorance, and offer his battered life to my niece! Was that well?"
"You could hardly wish him to have told your niece the whole story. Besides, it is a thing of the past. No man can go through life with the burden of his youthful follies hanging round his neck, and strangling him."
"The past is as much a part of a man's life as the present. I want my niece's husband to be a man of an unstained past."
"Then you will have to wait a long time for him. My dear Mrs. Tregonell, pray be reasonable, just commonly reasonable! There is not a family in England into which Angus Hamleigh would not be received with open arms, if he offered himself as a suitor. Why should you draw a hard-and-fast line, sacrifice Belle's happiness to a chimerical idea of manly virtue? You can't have King Arthur for your niece's husband, and if you could, perhaps you wouldn't care about him. Why not be content with Lancelot, who has sinned, and is sorry for his sin; and of whom may be spoken praise almost as noble as those famous words Sir Bohort spoke over his friend's dead body."
"I shall not sacrifice Belle's happiness. If she were my daughter I should take upon myself to judge for her, and while I lived she should never see Angus Hamleigh's face again. But she is my sister's child, and I shall give her the liberty of judgment."
"You don't mean that you will tell her this story?"
"Most decidedly."
"For God's sake, don't!—you will spoil her happiness for ever. To you and me, who must have some knowledge of the world, it ought to be a small thing that a man has made a fool of himself about an actress. We ought to know for how little that kind of folly counts in a lifetime. But for a girl brought up like Christabel it will mean disenchantment—doubt—perhaps a lifetime of jealousy and self-torment. For mercy's sake, be reasonable in this matter! I am talking to you as if I were Christabel's father, remember. I suppose that old harridan, Lady Cumberbridge, told you this precious story. Such women ought to be put down by Act of Parliament. Yes, there should be a law restricting every unattached female over five-and-forty to a twenty-mile radius of her country-house. After that age their tongues are dangerous."
"My friend Lady Cumberbridge told me facts which seem to be within everybody's knowledge; and she told them at my particular request. Your rudeness about her does not make the case any better for Mr. Hamleigh, or for you."
"I think I had better go and dine at my club," said the Major, perfectly placid.
"No, stay, please. You have proved yourself a broken reed to lean upon; but still you are a reed."
"If I stay it will be to persuade you to spare Belle the knowledge of this wretched story."
"I suppose he has almost ruined himself for the creature," said Mrs. Tregonell, glancing at the subject for the first time from a practical point of view.
"He spent a good many thousands, but as he had no other vices—did not race or gamble—his fortune survived the shock. His long majority allowed for considerable accumulations, you see. He began life with a handsome capital in hand. I dare say Miss Mayne sweated that down for him!"
"I don't want to go into details—I only want to know how far he deceived us?"
"There was no deception as to his means—which are ample—nor as to the fact that he is entirely free from the entanglement we have been talking about. Every one in London knows that the affair was over and done with more than a year ago."
The two girls came down to the drawing-room, and dinner was announced. It was a very dismal dinner—the dreariest that had ever been eaten in that house, Christabel thought. Mrs. Tregonell was absorbed in her own thoughts, absent, automatic in all she said and did. The Major maintained a forced hilarity, which was more painful than silence. Jessie looked anxious.
"I'll tell you what, girls," said Major Bree, as the mournful meal languished towards its melancholy close, "we seem all very doleful without Hamleigh. I'll run round to Bond Street directly after dinner, and see if I can get three stalls for 'Lohengrin.' They are often to be had at the last moment."
"Please, don't," said Christabel, earnestly; "I would not go to a theatre again without Angus. I am sorry I went the other night. It was obstinate and foolish of me to insist upon seeing that play, and I was punished for it by that horrid old woman this afternoon."
"But you liked the play?"
"Yes—while I was seeing it; but now I have taken a dislike to Miss Mayne. I feel as if I had seen a snake—all grace and lovely colour—and had caught hold of it, only to find that it was a snake."
The Major stared and looked alarmed. Was this an example of instinct superior to reason?
"Let me try for the opera," he said. "I'm sure it would do you good to go. You will sit in the front drawing-room listening for hansoms all the evening, fancying that every pair of wheels you hear is bringing Angus back to you."
"I would rather be doing that than be sitting at the opera, thinking of him. But I'm afraid there's no chance of his coming to-night. His letter to-day told me that his aunt insists upon his staying two or three days longer, and that she is ill enough to make him anxious to oblige her."
The evening passed in placid dreariness. Mrs. Tregonell sat brooding in her armchair—pondering whether she should or should not tell Christabel everything—knowing but too well how the girl's happiness was dependent upon her undisturbed belief in her lover, yet repeating to herself again and again that it was right and fair that Christabel should know the truth—nay, ever so much better that she should be told it now, when she was still free to shape her own future, than that she should make the discovery later, when she was Angus Hamleigh's wife. This last consideration—the thought, that a secret which was everybody's secret must inevitably, sooner or later, become known to Christabel—weighed heavily with Mrs. Tregonell; and through all her meditations there was interwoven the thought of her absent son, and how his future welfare might depend upon the course to be taken now.
Christabel played and sang, while the Major and Jessie Bridgeman sat at bezique. The friendship of these two had been in no wise disturbed by the Major's offer, and the lady's rejection. It was the habit of both to take life pleasantly. Jessie took pains to show the Major how sincerely she valued his esteem—how completely she appreciated the fine points of his character; and he was too much a gentleman to remind her by one word or tone of his disappointment that day in the wood above Maidenhead.
The evening came to its quiet end at last. Christabel had scarcely left her piano in the dim little third room—she had sat there in the faint light, playing slow sleepy nocturnes and lieder, and musing, musing sadly, with a faint sick dread of coming sorrow. She had seen it in her aunt's face. When the old buhl clock chimed the half-hour after ten the Major got up and took his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he pressed her hand at parting to murmur: "Remember," with an accent as solemn as Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon.