"Haply in his dreams the windWafts him here and lets him findThe lovely orphan child again,In her castle by the coast;The youngest fairest chatelaine,That this realm of France can boast,Our snowdrop by the Atlantic sea,Iseult of Brittany,"
"Haply in his dreams the windWafts him here and lets him findThe lovely orphan child again,In her castle by the coast;The youngest fairest chatelaine,That this realm of France can boast,Our snowdrop by the Atlantic sea,Iseult of Brittany,"
"Poor Iseult of the White Hand," said a voice at Christabel's shoulder, "after all was not her lot the saddest—had not she the best claim to our pity?"
Christabel started, turned, and she and Angus Hamleigh looked in each other's faces in the clear bright light. It was over four years since they had parted, tenderly, fondly, as plighted husband and wife, locked in each other's arms, promising each other speedy reunion, ineffably happy in their assurance of a future to be spent together: and now they met with pale cheeks, and lips dressed in a society smile—eyes—to which tears would have been a glad relief—assuming a careless astonishment.
"You here, Mr. Hamleigh!" cried Jessie, seeing Christabel's lips quiver dumbly, as if in the vain attempt at words, and rushing to the rescue. "We were told you were in Russia."
"I have been in Russia. I spent last winter at Petersburg—the only place where caviare and Adelina Patti are to be enjoyed in perfection—and I spent a good deal of this summer that is just gone in the Caucasus."
"How nice!" exclaimed Jessie, as if he had been talking of Buxton or Malvern. "And did you really enjoy it?"
"Immensely. All I ever saw in Switzerland is as nothing compared with the gloomy grandeur of that mighty semicircle of mountain peaks, of which Elburz, the shining mountain, the throne of Ormuzd, occupies the centre."
"And how do you happen to be here—on this insignificant mound?" asked Jessie.
"Tintagel's surge-beat hill can never seem insignificant to me. National poetry has peopled it—while the Caucasus is only a desert."
"Are you touring?"
"No, I am staying with the Vicar of Trevena. He is an old friend of my father's: they were college chums; and Mr. Carlyon is always kind to me."
Mr. Carlyon was a new vicar, who had come to Trevena within the last two years.
"Shall you stay long?" asked Christabel, in tones which had a curiously flat sound, as of a voice produced by mechanism.
"I think not. It is a delicious place to stay at, but——"
"A little of it goes a long way," said Jessie.
"You have not quite anticipated my sentiments, Miss Bridgeman. I was going to say that unfortunately for me I have engagements in London which will prevent my staying here much longer."
"You are not looking over robust," said Jessie, touched with pity by the sad forecast which she saw in his faded eyes, his hollow cheeks, faintly tinged with hectic bloom. "I'm afraid the Caucasus was rather too severe a training for you."
"A little harder than the ordeal to which you submitted my locomotive powers some years ago," answered Angus, smiling; "but how can a man spend the strength of his manhood better than in beholding the wonders of creation? It is the best preparation for those still grander scenes which one faintly hopes to see by-and-by among the stars. According to the Platonic theory a man must train himself for immortality. He who goes straight from earthly feasts and junkettings will get a bad time in the under world, or may have to work out his purgation in some debased brute form."
"Poor fellow," thought Jessie, with a sigh, "I suppose that kind of feeling is his nearest approach to religion."
Christabel sat very still, looking steadily towards Lundy, as if the only desire in her mind were to identify yonder vague streak of purplish brown or brownish purple with the level strip of land chiefly given over to rabbits. Yet her heart was aching and throbbing passionately all the while; and the face at which she dared scarce look was vividly before her mental sight—sorely altered from the day she had last seen it smile upon her in love and confidence. But mixed with the heartache there was joy. To see him again, to hear his voice again—what could that be but happiness?
She knew that there was delight in being with him, and she told herself that she had no right to linger. She rose with an automatic air. "Come, Jessie," she said: and then she turned with an effort to the man whose love she had renounced, whose heart she had broken.
"Good-by!" she said, holding out her hand, and looking at him with calm, grave eyes. "I am very glad to have seen you again. I hope you always think of me as your friend?"
"Yes, Mrs. Tregonell, I can afford now to think of you as a friend," he answered, gravely, gently, holding her hand with a lingering grasp, and looking solemnly into the sweet pale face.
He shook hands cordially with Jessie Bridgeman; and they left him standing amidst the low grass-hidden graves of the unknown dead—a lonely figure looking seaward.
"Oh! Jessie, do you remember the day we first came here with him?" cried Christabel, as they went slowly down the steep winding path. The exclamation sounded almost like a cry of pain.
"Am I ever likely to forget it—or anything connected with him? You have given me no chance of that," retorted Miss Bridgeman, sharply.
"How bitterly you say that!"
"Can I help being bitter when I see you nursing morbid feelings? Am I to encourage you to dwell upon dangerous thoughts?"
"They are not dangerous. I have taught myself to think of Angus as a friend—and a friend only. If I could see him now and then—even as briefly as we saw him to-day—I think it would make me quite happy."
"You don't know what you are talking about!" said Jessie, angrily. "Certainly, you are not much like other women. You are a piece of icy propriety—your love is a kind of milk-and-watery sentiment, which would never lead you very far astray. I can fancy you behaving somewhat in the style of Werther's Charlotte—who is, to my mind, one of the most detestable women in fiction. Yes! Goethe has created two women who are the opposite poles of feeling—Gretchen and Lottie—and I would stake my faith that Gretchen the fallen has a higher place in heaven than Lottie the impeccable. I hate such dull purity, which is always lined with selfishness. The lover may slay himself in his anguish—but she—yes—Thackeray has said it—she goes on cutting bread and butter!"
Jessie gave a little hysterical laugh, which she accentuated by a leap from the narrow path where she had been walking to a boulder four or five feet below.
"How madly you talk, Jessie. You remind me of Scott's Fenella—and I believe you are almost as wild a creature," said Christabel.
"Yes! I suspect there is a spice of gipsy blood in my veins. I am subject to these occasional outbreaks—these revolts against Philistinism. Life is so steeped in respectability—the dull level morality which prompts every man to do what his neighbour thinks he ought to do, rather than to be set in motion by the fire that burns within him. This dread of one's neighbour—this slavish respect for public opinion—reduces life to mere mechanism—society to a stage play."
Christabel said no word to her husband about that unexpected meeting with Angus Hamleigh. She knew that the name was obnoxious to Leonard, and she shrank from a statement which might provoke unpleasant speech on his part. Mr. Hamleigh would doubtless have left Trevena in a few days—there was no likelihood of any further meeting.
The next day was a blank day for the Miss Vandeleurs, who found themselves reduced to the joyless society of their own sex.
The harriers met at Trevena at ten o'clock, and thither, after an early breakfast, rode Mr. Tregonell, Captain Vandeleur, and three or four other kindred spirits. The morning was showery and blustery, and it was in vain that Dopsy and Mopsy hinted their desire to be driven to the meet. They were not horsewomen—from no want of pluck or ardour for the chase—but simply from the lack of that material part of the business, horses. Many and many a weary summer day had they paced the path beside Rotten Row, wistfully regarding the riders, and thinking what a seat and what hands they would have had, if Providence had only given them a mount. The people who do not ride are the keenest critics of horsemanship.
Compelled to find their amusements within doors, Dopsy and Mopsy sat in the morning-room for half an hour, as a sacrifice to good manners, paid a duty visit to the nurseries to admire Christabel's baby-boy, and then straggled off to the billiard-room, to play each other, and improve their skill at that delightfully masculine game. Then came luncheon—at which meal, the gentlemen being all away, and the party reduced to four, the baby-boy was allowed to sit on his mother's lap, and make occasional raids upon the table furniture, while the Miss Vandeleurs made believe to worship him. He was a lovely boy, with big blue eyes, wide with wonder at a world which was still full of delight and novelty.
After luncheon, Mopsy and Dopsy retired to their chamber, to concoct, by an ingenious process of re-organization of the same atoms, a new costume for the evening; and as they sat at their work, twisting and undoing bows and lace, and straightening the leaves of artificial flowers, they again discoursed somewhat dejectedly of their return to South Belgravia, which could hardly be staved off much longer.
"We have had a quite too delicious time," sighed Mopsy, adjusting the stalk of a sunflower; "but it's rather a pity that all the men staying here have been detrimentals—not one worth catching."
"What does it matter!" ejaculated Dopsy. "If there had been one worth catching, he wouldn't have consented to be caught. He would have behaved like that big jack Mr. Tregonell was trying for the other morning; eaten up all our bait and gone and sulked among the weeds."
"Well, I'd have had a try for him, anyhow," said Mopsy, defiantly, leaning her elbow on the dressing-table, and contemplating herself deliberately in the glass. "Oh, Dop, how old I'm getting. I almost hate the daylight: it makes one look so hideous."
Yet neither Dopsy nor Mopsy thought herself hideous at afternoon tea-time, when, with complexions improved by the powder puff, eyebrows piquantly accentuated with Indian ink, and loose flowing tea-gowns of old gold sateen, and older black silk, they descended to the library, eager to do execution even on detrimentals. The men's voices sounded loud in the hall, as the two girls came downstairs.
"Hope you have had a good time?" cried Mopsy, in cheerful soprano tones.
"Splendid. I'm afraid Tregonell has lamed a couple of his horses," said Captain Vandeleur.
"And I've a shrewd suspicion that you've lamed a third," interjected Leonard in his strident tones. "You galloped Betsy Baker at a murderous rate."
"Nothing like taking them fast down hill," retorted Jack. "B. B. is as sound as a roach—and quite as ugly."
"Never saw such break-neck work in my life," said Mr. Montagu, a small dandified person who was always called "little Monty." "I'd rather ride a horse with the Quorn for a week than in this country for a day."
"Our country is as God made it," answered Leonard.
"I think Satan must have split it about a bit afterwards," said Mr. Montagu.
"Well, Mop," asked Leonard, "how did you and Dop get rid of your day without us?"
"Oh, we were very happy. It was quite a relief to have a nice homey day with dear Mrs. Tregonell," answered Mopsy, nothing offended by the free and easy curtailment of her pet name. Leonard was her benefactor, and a privileged person.
"I've got some glorious news for you two girls," said Mr. Tregonell, as they all swarmed into the library, where Christabel was sitting in the widow's old place, while Jessie Bridgeman filled her accustomed position before the tea-table, the red glow of a liberal wood fire contending with the pale light of one low moderator lamp, under a dark velvet shade.
"What is it? Please, please tell."
"I give it you in ten—a thousand—a million!" cried Leonard, flinging himself into the chair next his wife, and with his eyes upon her face. "You'll never guess. I have found you an eligible bachelor—a swell of the first water. He's a gentleman whom a good many girls have tried for in their time, I've no doubt. Handsome, accomplished, plenty of coin. He has had what the French call a stormy youth, I believe; but that doesn't matter. He's getting on in years, and no doubt he's ready to sober down, and take to domesticity. I've asked him here for a fortnight to shoot woodcock, and to offer his own unconscious breast as a mark for the arrows of Cupid; and I shall have a very poor opinion of you two girls if you can't bring him to your feet in half the time."
"At any rate I'll try my hand at it," said Mopsy. "Not that I care a straw for the gentleman, but just to show you what I can do," she added, by way of maintaining her maidenly dignity.
"Of course you'll go in for the conquest as high art, without anyarrière pensée," said Jack Vandeleur. "There never were such audacious flirts as my sisters; but there's no malice in them."
"You haven't told us your friend's name," said Dopsy.
"Mr. Hamleigh," answered Leonard, with his eyes still on his wife's face.
Christabel gave a little start, and looked at him in undisguised astonishment.
"Surely you have not asked him—here?" she exclaimed.
"Why not? He was out with us to-day. He is a jolly fellow; rides uncommonly straight, though he doesn't look as if there were much life in him. He tailed off early in the afternoon; but while he did go, he went dooced well. He rode a dooced fine horse, too."
"I thought you were prejudiced against him," said Christabel, very slowly.
"Why, so I was, till I saw him," answered Leonard, with the friendliest air. "I fancied he was one of your sickly, sentimental twaddlers, with long hair, and a taste for poetry; but I find he is a fine, manly fellow, with no nonsense about him. So I asked him here, and insisted upon his saying yes. He didn't seem to want to come, which is odd, for he made himself very much at home here in my mother's time, I've heard. However, he gave in when I pressed him; and he'll be here by dinner-time to-morrow."
"By dinner-time," thought Mopsy, delighted. "Then he'll see us first by candlelight, and first impressions may do so much."
"Isn't it almost like a fairy tale?" said Dopsy, as they were dressing for dinner, with a vague recollection of having cultivated her imagination in childhood. She had never done so since that juvenile age. "Just as we were sighing for the prince he comes."
"True," said Mopsy; "and he will go, just as all the other fairy princes have gone, leaving us alone upon the dreary high road, and riding off to the fairy princesses who have good homes, and good clothes, and plenty of money."
The high-art toilets were postponed for the following evening, so that the panoply of woman's war might be fresh; and on that evening Mopsy and Dopsy, their long limbs sheathed in sea-green velveteen, Toby-frills round their necks, and sunflowers on their shoulders, were gracefully grouped near the fireplace in the pink and white panelled drawing-room, waiting for Mr. Hamleigh's arrival.
"I wonder why all the girls make themselves walking advertisements of the Sun Fire Office," speculated Mr. Montagu, taking a prosaic view of the Vandeleur sunflowers, as he sat by Miss Bridgeman's work-basket.
"Don't you know that sunflowers are so beautifully Greek?" asked Jessie. "They have been the only flower in fashion since Alma Tadema took to painting them—fountains, and marble balustrades, and Italian skies, and beautiful women, and sunflowers."
"Yes; but we get only the sunflowers."
"Mr. Hamleigh!" said the butler at the open door, and Angus came in, and went straight to Christabel, who was sitting opposite the group of sea-green Vandeleurs, slowly fanning herself with a big black fan.
Nothing could be calmer than their meeting. This time there was no surprise, no sudden shock, no dear familiar scene, no solemn grandeur of Nature to make all effort at simulation unnatural. The atmosphere to-night was as conventional as the men's swallowed-tailed coats and white ties. Yet in Angus Hamleigh's mind there was the picture of his first arrival at Mount Royal—the firelit room, Christabel's girlish figure kneeling on the hearth. The figure was a shade more matronly now, the carriage and manner were more dignified; but the face had lost none of its beauty, or of its divine candour.
"I am very glad my husband persuaded you to alter your plans, and to stay a little longer in the West," she said, with an unfaltering voice; and then, seeing Mopsy and Dopsy looking at Mr. Hamleigh with admiring expectant eyes, she added, "Let me introduce you to these young ladies who are staying with us—Mr. Hamleigh, Miss Vandeleur, Miss Margaret Vandeleur."
Dopsy and Mopsy smiled their sweetest smiles, and gave just the most æsthetic inclination of each towzled head.
"I suppose you have not long come from London?" murmured Dopsy, determined not to lose a moment. "Have you seen all the new things at the theatres? I hope you are an Irvingite!"
"I regret to say that my religious opinions have not yet taken that bent. It is a spiritual height which I feel myself too weak to climb. I have never been able to believe in the unknown tongues."
"Ah, now you are going to criticize his pronunciation, instead of admiring his genius," said Dopsy, who had never heard of Edward Irving and the Latter Day Saints.
"If you mean Henry Irving the tragedian, I admire him immensely," said Mr. Hamleigh.
"Then we are sure to get on. I felt that you must besimpatica," replied Dopsy, not particular as to a gender in a language which she only knew by sight, as Bannister knew Greek.
Dinner was announced at this moment, and Mrs. Tregonell won Dopsy's gratitude by asking Mr. Hamleigh to take her into dinner. Mr. Montagu gave his arm to Miss Bridgeman, Leonard took Mopsy, and Christabel followed with Major Bree, who felt for her keenly, wondering how she managed to bear herself so bravely, reproaching the dead woman in his mind for having parted two faithful hearts.
He was shocked by the change in Angus, obvious even to-night, albeit the soft lamplight and evening dress were flattering to his appearance; but he said no word of that change to Christabel.
"I have been having a romp with my godson," he said, when they were seated, knowing that this was the one topic likely to cheer and interest his hostess.
"I am so glad," she answered, lighting up at once, and unconscious that Angus was trying to see her face under the low lamplight, which made it necessary to bend one's head a little to see one's opposite neighbour. "And do you think he is grown? It is nearly ten days since you saw him, and he grows so fast."
"He is a young Hercules. If there were any snakes in Cornwall he would be capable of strangling a brace of them. I suppose Leonard is tremendously proud of him."
"Yes," she answered with a faint sigh. "I think Leonard isproudof him."
"But not quite so fond of him as you are," replied Major Bree, interpreting her emphasis. "That is only natural. Infantolatry is a feminine attribute. Wait till the boy is old enough to go out fishin' and shootin'—" the Major was too much a gentleman to pronounce a final g—"and then see if his father don't dote upon him."
"I dare say he will be very fond of him then. But I shall be miserable every hour he is out."
"Of course. Women ought to have only girls for children. There should be a race of man-mothers to rear the boys. I wonder Plato didn't suggest that in his Republic."
Mr. Hamleigh, with his head gently bent over his soup-plate, had contrived to watch Christabel's face while politely replying to a good deal of gush on the part of the fair Dopsy. He saw that expressive face light up with smiles, and then grow earnest. She was full of interest and animation, and her candid look showed that the conversation was one which all the world might have heard.
"She has forgotten me. She is happy in her married life," he said to himself, and then he looked to the other end of the table where Leonard sat, burly, florid, black-haired, mutton-chop whiskered, the very essence of Philistinism—"happy—with him."
"And I am sure you must adore Ellen Terry," said Dopsy, whose society-conversation was not a many-stringed instrument.
"Who could live and not worship her?" ejaculated Mr. Hamleigh.
"Irving as Shylock!" sighed Dopsy.
"Miss Terry as Portia," retorted Angus.
"Unutterably sweet, was she not?"
"Her movements were like a sonata by Beethoven—her gowns were the essence of all that Rubens and Vandyck ever painted."
"I knew you would agree with me," exclaimed Dopsy. "And do you think her pretty?"
"Pretty is not the word. She is simply divine. Greuze might have painted her—there is no living painter whose palette holds the tint of those blue eyes."
Dopsy began to giggle softly to herself, and to flutter her fan with maiden modesty.
"I hardly like to mention it after what you have said," she murmured, "but——"
"Pray be explicit."
"I have been told that I am rather"—another faint giggle and another flutter—"like Miss Terry."
"I never met a fair-haired girl yet who had not been told as much," answered Mr. Hamleigh coolly.
Dopsy turned crimson, and felt that this particular arrow had missed the gold. Mr. Hamleigh was not quite so easy to get on with as her hopeful fancy had painted him.
After dinner there was some music, in which art neither of the Miss Vandeleurs excelled. Indeed, their time had been too closely absorbed by the ever pressing necessity for cutting and contriving to allow of the study of art and literature. They knew the names of writers, and the outsides of books, and they adored the opera, and enjoyed a ballad concert, if the singers were popular, and the audience well dressed; and this was the limit of their artistic proclivities. They sat stifling their yawns, and longing for an adjournment to the billiard room—whither Jack Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu had departed—while Christabel played a capriccio by Mendelssohn. Mr. Hamleigh sat by the piano listening to every note. Leonard and Major Bree lounged by the fireplace, Jessie Bridgeman sitting near them, absorbed in her crewel work.
It was what Mopsy and Dopsy called a very "slow" evening, despite the new interest afforded by Mr. Hamleigh's presence. He was very handsome, very elegant, with an inexpressible something in his style and air which Mopsy thought poetical. But it was weary work to sit and gaze at him as if he were a statue, and that long capriccio, with a little Beethoven to follow, and a good deal of Mozart after that, occupied the best part of the evening. To the ears of Mop and Dop it was all tweedledum and tweedledee. They would have been refreshed by one of those lively melodies in which Miss Farren so excels; they would have welcomed a familiar strain from Chilperic or Madame Angot. Yet they gushed and said, "too delicious—quite too utterly lovely," when Mrs. Tregonell rose from the piano.
"I only hope I have not wearied everybody," she said.
Leonard and Major Bree had been talking local politics all the time, and both expressed themselves much gratified by the music. Mr. Hamleigh murmured his thanks.
Christabel went to her room wondering that the evening had passed so calmly—that her heart—though it had ached at the change in Angus Hamleigh's looks, had been in no wise tumultuously stirred by his presence. There had been a peaceful feeling in her mind rather than agitation. She had been soothed and made happy by his society. If love still lingered in her breast it was love purified of every earthly thought and hope. She told herself sorrowfully that for him the sand ran low in the glass of earthly time, and it was sweet to have him near her for a little while towards the end; to be able to talk to him of serious things—to inspire hope in a soul whose natural bent was despondency. It would be sadly, unutterably sweet to talk to him of that spiritual world whose unearthly light already shone in the too brilliant eye, and coloured the hollow cheek. She had found Mr. Hamleigh despondent and sceptical, but never indifferent to religion. He was not one of that eminently practical school which, in the words of Matthew Arnold, thinks it more important to learn how buttons andpapier-mâchéare made than to search the depths of conscience, or fathom the mysteries of a Divine Providence.
Christabel's first sentiment when Leonard announced Mr. Hamleigh's intended visit had been horror. How could they two who had loved so deeply, parted so sadly, live together under the same roof as if they were every day friends? The thing seemed fraught with danger, impossible for peace. But when she remembered that calm, almost solemn look with which he had shaken hands with her among the graves at Tintagel, it seemed to her that friendship—calmest, purest, most unselfish attachment—was still possible between them. She thought so even more hopefully on the morning after Mr. Hamleigh's arrival, when he took her boy in his arms, and pressed his lips lovingly upon the bright baby brow.
"You are fond of children," exclaimed Mopsy, prepared to gush.
"Very fond of some children," he answered gravely. "I shall be very fond of this boy, if he will let me."
"Leo is such a darling—and he takes to you already," said Mopsy, seeing that the child graciously accepted Mr. Hamleigh's attentions, and even murmured an approving "gur"—followed by a simple one-part melody of gurgling noises—but whether in approval of the gentlemen himself or of his watch-chain, about which the pink flexible fingers had wound themselves, was an open question.
This was in the hall after breakfast, on a bright sunshiny morning—doors and windows open, and the gardens outside all abloom with chrysanthemums and scarlet geraniums; the gentlemen of the party standing about with their guns ready to start. Mopsy and Dopsy were dressed in home-made gowns of dark brown serge which simulated the masculine simplicity of tailor-made garments. They wore coquettish little toques of the same dark brown stuff, also home-made—and surely, if a virtuous man contending with calamity is a spectacle meet for the gods to admire a needy young woman making her own raiment is at least worthy of human approval.
"You are coming with us, aren't you, Hamleigh," asked Leonard, seeing Angus still occupied with the child.
"No, thanks; I don't feel in good form for woodcock shooting. My cough was rather troublesome last night."
Mopsy and Dopsy looked at each other despairingly. Here was a golden opportunity lost. If it were only possible to sprain an ankle on the instant.
Jack Vandeleur was a good brother—so long as fraternal kindness did not cost money—and he saw that look of blank despair in poor Dopsy's eyes and lips.
"I think Mr. Hamleigh is wise," he said. "This bright morning will end in broken weather. Hadn't you two girls better stay at home? The rain will spoil your gowns."
"Our gowns won't hurt," said Mopsy brightening. "But do you really think there will be rain? We had so set our hearts on going with you; but it is rather miserable to be out on those hills in a blinding rain. One might walk over the edge of a cliff."
"Keep on the safe side and stay at home," said Leonard, with that air of rough good nature which is such an excellent excuse for bad manners. "Come Ponto, come Juno, hi Delia," this to the lovely lemon and white spaniels, fawning upon him with mute affection.
"I think we may as well give it up," said Dopsy, "we shall be a nuisance to the shooters if it rains."
So they stayed, and beguiled Mr. Hamleigh to the billiard room, where they both played against him, and were beaten—after which Mopsy entreated him to give her a lesson in the art, declaring that he played divinely—in such a quite style—so very superior to Jack's or Mr. Tregonell's, though both those gentlemen were good players. Angus consented, kindly enough, and gave both ladies the most careful instruction in the art of making pockets and cannons; but he was wondering all the while how Christabel was spending her morning, and thinking how sweet it would have been to have strolled with her across the hills to the quiet little church in the dingle where he had once dreamed they two might be married.
"I was a fool to submit to delay," he thought, remembering all the pain and madness of the past. "If I had insisted on being married here—and at once—how happy—oh God!—how happy we might have been. Well, it matters little, now that the road is so near the end. I suppose the dismal close would have come just as soon if my way of life had been strewed with flowers."
It was luncheon-time before the Miss Vandeleurs consented to release him. Once having got him in their clutch he was as firmly held as if he had been caught by an octopus. Christabel wondered a little that Angus Hamleigh should find amusement for his morning in the billiard room, and in such society.
"Perhaps, after all, the Miss Vandeleurs are the kind of girls whom all gentlemen admire," she said to Jessie. "I know I thought it odd that Leonard should admire them; but you see Mr. Hamleigh is equally pleased with them."
"Mr. Hamleigh is nothing of the kind," answered Jessie in her usual decided way. "But Dop is setting her cap at him in a positively disgraceful manner—even for Dop."
"Pray don't call her by that horrid name."
"Why not; it is what her brother and sister call her, and it expresses her so exactly."
Mr. Hamleigh and the two damsels now appeared, summoned by the gong, and they all went into the dining-room. It was quite a merry luncheon party. Care seemed to have no part in that cheery circle. Angus had made up his mind to be happy, and Christabel was as much at ease with him as she had been in those innocent, unconscious days when he first came to Mount Royal. Dopsy was in high spirits, thinking that she was fast advancing towards victory. Mr. Hamleigh had been so kind, so attentive, had done exactly what she had asked him to do, and how could she doubt that he had consulted his own pleasure in so doing. Poor Dopsy was accustomed to be treated with scant ceremony by her brother's acquaintance, and it did not enter into her mind that a man might be bored by her society, and not betray his weariness.
After luncheon Jessie, who was always energetic, suggested a walk.
The threatened bad weather had not come: it was a greyish afternoon, sunless but mild.
"If we walk towards St. Nectan's Kieve, we may meet the shooters," said Christabel. "That is a great place for woodcock."
"That will be delicious!" exclaimed Dopsy. "I worship St. Nectan's Kieve. Such a lovely ferny, rocky, wild, watery spot." And away she and her sister skipped, to put on the brown toques, and to refresh themselves with a powder puff.
They started for their ramble with Randie, and a favourite Clumber spaniel, degraded from his proud position as a sporting dog, to the ignoble luxury of a house pet, on account of an incorrigible desultoriness in his conduct with birds.
These affectionate creatures frisked round Christabel, while Miss Vandeleur and her sister seemed almost as friskily to surround Mr. Hamleigh with their South Belgravian blandishments.
"You look as if you were not very strong," hazarded Dopsy, sympathetically. "Are you not afraid of a long walk?"
"Not at all; I never feel better than when walking on these hills," answered Angus. "It is almost my native air, you see. I came here to get a stock of rude health before I go to winter in the South."
"And you are really going to be abroad all the winter?" sighed Dopsy, as if she would have said, "How shall I bear my life in your absence."
"Yes, it is five years since I spent a winter in England. I hold my life on that condition. I am never to know the luxury of a London fog, or see a Drury Lane pantomime, or skate upon the Serpentine. A case of real distress, is it not?"
"Very sad—for your friends," said Dopsy; "but I can quite imagine that you love the sunny South. How I long to see the Mediterranean—the mountains—the pine-trees—the border-land of Italy."
"No doubt you will go there some day—and be disappointed. People generally are when they indulge in day-dreams about a place."
"My dreams will always be dreams," answered Dopsy, with a profound sigh: "we are not rich enough to travel."
Christabel walked on in front with Jessie and the dogs. Mr. Hamleigh was longing to be by her side—to talk as they had talked of old—of a thousand things which could be safely discussed without any personal feeling. They had so many sympathies, so many ideas in common. All the world of sense and sentiment was theirs wherein to range at will. But Dopsy and Mopsy stuck to him like burs; plying him with idle questions, and stereotyped remarks, looking at him with languishing eyes.
He was too much a gentleman, had too much good feeling to be rude to them—but he was bored excessively.
They went by the cliffs—a wild grand walk. The wide Atlantic spread its dull leaden-coloured waves before them under the grey sky—touched with none of those translucent azures and carmines which so often beautify that western sea. They crossed a bit of hillocky common, and then went down to look at a slate quarry under the cliff—a scene of uncanny grandeur—grey and wild and desolate.
Dopsy and Mopsy gushed and laughed and declared it was just the scene for a murder, or a duel, or something dreadful and dramatic. The dogs ran into all manner of perilous places, and had to be called away from the verge of instant death.
"Are you fond of aristocratic society. Miss Vandeleur?" asked Angus.
Mopsy pleaded guilty to a prejudice in favour of the Upper Ten.
"Then allow me to tell you that you were never in the company of so many duchesses and countesses in your life as you are at this moment."
Mopsy looked mystified, until Miss Bridgeman explained that these were the names given to slates of particular sizes, great stacks of which stood on either side of them ready for shipment.
"How absurd," exclaimed Mopsy.
"Everything must have a name, even the slate that roofs your scullery."
From the quarry they strolled across the fields to the high road, and the gate of the farm which contains within its boundary the wonderful waterfall called St. Nectan's Kieve.
They met the sportsmen coming out of the hollow with well-filled game-bags.
Leonard was in high spirits.
"So you've all come to meet us," he said, looking at his wife, and from his wife to Angus Hamleigh, with a keen, quick glance, too swift to be remarkable. "Uncommonly good of you. We are going to have a grand year for woodcock, I believe—like the season of 1855, when a farmer at St. Buryan shot fifty-four in one week."
"Poor dear little birds!" sighed Mopsy; "I feel so sorry for them."
"But that doesn't prevent your eating them, with breadcrumbs and gravy," said Leonard, laughing.
"When they are once roasted, it can make no difference who eats them," replied Mopsy; "but I am intensely sorry for them all the same."
They all went home together, a cheery procession, with the dogs at their heels. Mr. Hamleigh's efforts to escape from the two damsels who had marked him for their own, were futile: nothing less than sheer brutality would have set him free. They trudged along gaily, one on each side of him; they flattered him, they made much of him—a man must have been stony-hearted to remain untouched by such attentions. Angus was marble, but he could not be uncivil. It was his nature to be gentle to women. Mop and Dop were the kind of girls he most detested—indeed, it seemed to him that no other form of girlhood could be so detestable. They had all the pertness of Bohemia without any of its wit—they had all the audacity of thedemi-monde, with far inferior attractions. Everything about them was spurious and second-hand—every air and look and tone was put on, like a ribbon or a flower, to attract attention. And could it be that one of these meretricious creatures was angling for him—for him, the Lauzun, the d'Eckmühl, the Prince de Belgioso, of his day—the born dandy, with whom fastidiousness was a sixth sense? Intolerable as the idea of being so pursued was to him, Angus Hamleigh could not bring himself to be rude to a woman.
It happened, therefore, that from the beginning to the end of that long ramble, he was never in Mrs. Tregonell's society. She and Jessie walked steadily ahead with their dogs, while the sportsmen tramped slowly behind Mr. Hamleigh and the two girls.
"Our friend seems to be very much taken by your sisters," said Leonard to Captain Vandeleur.
"My sisters are deuced taking girls," answered Jack, puffing at his seventeenth cigarette; "though I suppose it isn't my business to say so. There's nothing of the professional beauty about either of 'em."
"Distinctly not!" said Leonard.
"But they've plenty ofchic—plenty of go—savoir faire—and all that kind of thing, don't you know. They're the most companionable girls I ever met with!"
"They're uncommonly jolly little buffers!" said Leonard, kindly, meaning it for the highest praise.
"They've no fool's flesh about them," said Jack; "and they can make a fiver go further than any one I know. A man might do worse than marry one of them."
"Hardly!" thought Leonard, "unless he married both."
"It would be a fine thing for Dop if Mr. Hamleigh were to come to the scratch," mused Jack.
"I wonder what was Leonard's motive in asking Mr. Hamleigh to stay at Mount Royal?" said Christabel, suddenly, after she and Jessie had been talking of indifferent subjects.
"I hope he had not any motive, but that the invitation was the impulse of the moment, without rhyme or reason," answered Miss Bridgeman.
"Why?"
"Because if he had a motive, I don't think it could be a good one."
"Might he not think it just possible that he was finding a husband for one of his friend's sisters?" speculated Christabel.
"Nonsense, my dear! Leonard is not quite a fool. If he had a motive, it was something very different from any concern for the interests of Dop or Mop—I will call them Dop and Mop: they are so like it."
In spite of Mopsy and Dopsy, there were hours in which Angus Hamleigh was able to enjoy the society which had once been so sweet to him, almost as freely as in the happy days that were gone. Brazen as the two damsels were the feeling of self-respect was not altogether extinct in their natures. Their minds were like grass-plots which had been trodden into mere clay, but where a lingering green blade here and there shows that the soil had once been verdant. Before Mr. Hamleigh came to Mount Royal, it had been their habit to spend their evenings in the billiard-room with the gentlemen, albeit Mrs. Tregonell very rarely left the drawing-room after dinner, preferring the perfect tranquillity of that almost deserted apartment, the inexhaustible delight of her piano or her books, with Jessie for her sole companion—nay, sometimes, quite alone, while Jessie joined the revellers at pool or shell-out. Dopsy and Mopsy could not altogether alter their habits because Mr. Hamleigh spent his evenings in the drawing-room: the motive for such a change would have been too obvious. The boldest huntress would scarce thus openly pursue her prey. So the Miss Vandeleurs went regretfully with their brother and his host, and marked, or played an occasional four-game, and made themselves conversationally agreeable all the evening; while Angus Hamleigh sat by the piano, and gave himself up to dreamy thought, soothed by the music of the great composers, played with a level perfection which only years of careful study can achieve. Jessie Bridgeman never left the drawing-room now of an evening. Faithful and devoted to her duty of companion and friend, she seemed almost Christabel's second self. There was no restraint, no embarrassment, caused by her presence. What she had been to these two in their day of joy, she was to them in their day of sorrow, wholly and completely one of themselves. She was no stony guardian of the proprieties; no bar between their souls and dangerous memories or allusions. She was their friend, reading and understanding the minds of both.
It has been finely said by Matthew Arnold that there are times when a man feels, in this life, the sense of immortality; and that feeling must surely be strongest with him who knows that his race is nearly run—who feels the rosy light of life's sunset warm upon his face—who knows himself near the lifting of the veil—the awful, fateful experiment called death. Angus Hamleigh knew that for him the end was not far off—it might be less than a year—more than a year—but he felt very sure that this time there would be no reprieve. Not again would the physician's sentence be reversed—the physician's theories gainsayed by facts. For the last four years he had lived as a man lives who has ceased to value his life. He had exposed himself to the hardships of mountain climbing—he had sat late in gaming saloons—not gambling himself, but interested in a cynical way, as Balzac might have been, in the hopes and fears of others—seeking amusement wherever and however it was to be found. At his worst he had never been a man utterly without religion; not a man who could willingly forego the hope in a future life—but that hope, until of late, had been clouded and dim, Rabelais' great perhaps, rather than the Christian's assured belief. As the cold shade of death drew nearer, the horizon cleared, and he was able to rest his hopes in a fair future beyond the grave—an existence in which a man's happiness should not be dependent on the condition of his lungs, nor his career marred by an hereditary taint in the blood—an existence in which spirit should be divorced from clay, yet not become so entirely abstract as to be incapable of such pleasures as are sweetest and purest among the joys of humanity—a life in which friendship and love might still be known in fullest measure. And now, with the knowledge that for him there remained but a brief remnant of this earthly existence, that were the circumstances of his life ever so full of joy, that life itself could not be lengthened, it was very sweet to him to spend a few quiet hours with her who, for the last five years, had been the pole-star of his thoughts. For him there could be noarrière pensée—no tending towards forbidden hopes, forbidden dreams. Death had purified life. It was almost as if he were an immortal spirit, already belonging to another world, yet permitted to revisit the old dead-and-gone love below. For such a man, and perhaps for such a man only, was such a super-mundane love as poets and idealists have imagined, all satisfying and all sweet. He was not even jealous of his happier rival; his only regret was the too evident unworthiness of that rival.
"If I had seen her married to a man I could respect; if I could know that she was completely happy; that the life before her were secure from all pain and evil, I should have nothing to regret," he told himself; but the thought of Leonard's coarse nature was a perpetual grief. "When I am lying in the long peaceful sleep, she will be miserable with that man," he thought.
One day when Jessie and he were alone together, he spoke freely of Leonard.
"I don't want to malign a man who has treated me with exceptional kindness and cordiality," he said, "above all a man whose mother I once loved, and always respected—yes, although she was hard and cruel to me—but I cannot help wishing that Christabel's husband had a more sympathetic nature. Now that my own future is reduced to a very short span I find myself given to forecasting the future of those I——love—and it grieves me to think of Christabel in the years to come—linked with a man who has no power to appreciate or understand her—tied to the mill-wheel of domestic duty."
"Yes, it is a hard case," answered Jessie, bitterly, "one of those hard cases that so often come out of people acting for the best, as they call it. No doubt Mrs. Tregonell thought she acted for the best with regard to you and Christabel. She did not know how much selfishness—a selfish idolatry of her own cub—was at the bottom of her over-righteousness. She was a good woman—generous, benevolent—a true friend to me—yet there are times when I feel angry with her—even in her grave—for her treatment of you and Christabel. Yet she died happy in the belief in her own wisdom. She thought Christabel's marriage with Leonard ought to mean bliss for both. Because she adored her Cornish gladiator, forsooth, she must needs think every body else ought to doat upon him."
"You don't seem warmly attached to Mr. Tregonell," said Angus.
"I am not—and he knows that I am not. I never liked him, and he never liked me, and neither of us have ever pretended to like each other. We are quits, I assure you. Perhaps you think it rather horrid of me to live in a man's house—eat his bread and drink his wine—one glass of claret every day at dinner—and dislike him openly all the time. But I am here because Christabel is here—just as I would be with her in the dominions of Orcus. She is—well—almost the only creature I love in this world, and it would take a good deal more than my dislike of her husband to part us. If she had married a galley-slave I would have taken my turn at the oar."
"You are as true as steel," said Angus; "and I am glad to think Christabel has such a friend."
To all the rest of the world he spoke of her as Mrs. Tregonell, nor did he ever address her by any other name. But to Jessie Bridgeman, who had been with them in the halcyon days of their love-making, she was still Christabel. To Jessie, and to none other, could he speak of her with perfect freedom.
The autumn days crept by, sometimes grey and sad of aspect, sometimes radiant and sunny, as if summer had risen from her grave amidst fallen leaves and faded heather. It was altogether a lovely autumn, like that beauteous season of five years ago, and Christabel and Angus wandered about the hills, and lingered by the trout stream in the warm green valley, almost as freely as they had done in the past. They were never alone—Jessie Bridgeman was always with them—very often Dopsy and Mopsy—and sometimes Mr. Tregonell with Captain Vandeleur and half a dozen dogs. One day they all went up the hill, and crossed the ploughed field to the path among the gorse and heather above Pentargon Bay—and Dopsy and Mopsy climbed crags and knolls, and screamed affrightedly, and made a large display of boots, and were generally fascinating after their manner.
"If any place could tempt me to smoke it would be this," said Dopsy, gazing seaward. All the men except Angus were smoking. "I think it must be utterly lovely to sit dreaming over a cigarette in such a place as this."
"What would you dream about," asked Angus. "A new bonnet?"
"Don't be cynical. You think I am awfully shallow, because I am not a perambulating bookshelf like Mrs. Tregonell, who seems to have read all the books that ever were printed."
"There you are wrong. She has read a few—non multa sed multum—but they are the very best, and she has read them well enough to remember them," answered Angus, quietly.
"And Mop and I often read three volumes in a day, and seldom remember a line of what we read," sighed Dopsy. "Indeed, we are awfully ignorant. Of course we learnt things at school—French and German—Italian—natural history—physical geography—geology—and all the onomies. Indeed, I shudder when I remember what a lot of learning was poured into our poor little heads, and how soon it all ran out again."
Dopsy gave her most fascinating giggle, and sat in an æsthetic attitude idly plucking up faded heather blossoms with a tightly gloved hand, and wondering whether Mr. Hamleigh noticed how small the hand was. She thought she was going straight to his heart with these naïve confessions; she had always heard that men hated learned women, and no doubt Mr. Hamleigh's habit of prosing about books with Mrs. Tregonell was merely the homage he payed to his hostess.
"You and Mrs. Tregonell are so dreadfully grave when you get together," pursued Dopsy, seeing that her companion held his peace. She had contrived to be by Mr. Hamleigh's side when he crossed the field, and had in a manner got possessed of him for the rest of the afternoon, barring some violent struggle for emancipation on his part. "I always wonder what you can find to say to each other."
"I don't think there is much cause for wonder. We have many tastes in common. We are both fond of music—of Nature—and of books. There is a wide field for conversation."
"Why won't you talk with me of books. There are some books I adore. Let us talk about Dickens."
"With all my heart. I admire every line he wrote—I think him the greatest genius of this age. We have had great writers—great thinkers—great masters of style—but Scott and Dickens were the Creators—they made new worlds and peopled them. I am quite ready to talk about Dickens."
"I don't think I could say a single word after that outburst of yours," said Dopsy; "you go too fast for me."
He had talked eagerly, willing to talk just now even to Miss Vandeleur, trying not too vividly to remember that other day—that unforgotten hour—in which, on this spot, face to face with that ever changing, ever changeless sea, he had submitted his fate to Christabel, not daring to ask for her love, warning her rather against the misery that might come to her from loving him. And misery had come, but not as he presaged. It had come from his youthful sin, that one fatal turn upon the road of life which he had taken so lightly, tripping with joyous companions along a path strewn with roses. He, like so many, had gathered his roses while he might, and had found that he had to bear the sting of their thorns when he must.
Leonard came up behind them as they talked, Mr. Hamleigh standing by Miss Vandeleur's side, digging his stick into the heather and staring idly at the sea.
"What are you two talking about so earnestly?" he asked; "you are always together. I begin to understand why Hamleigh is so indifferent to sport."
The remark struck Angus as strange, as well as underbred. Dopsy had contrived to inflict a good deal of her society upon him at odd times; but he had taken particular care that nothing in his bearing or discourse should compromise either himself or the young lady.
Dopsy giggled faintly, and looked modestly at the heather. It was still early in the afternoon, and the western light shone full upon a face which might have been pretty if Nature's bloom had not long given place to the poetic pallor of the powder-puff.
"We were talking about Dickens," said Dopsy, with an elaborate air of struggling with the tumult of her feelings. "Don't you adore him?"
"If you mean the man who wrote books, I never read 'em," answered Leonard; "life isn't long enough for books that don't teach you anything. I've read pretty nearly every book that was ever written upon horses and dogs and guns, and a good many on mechanics; that's enough for me. I don't care for books that only titillate one's imagination. Why should one read books to make oneself cry and to make oneself laugh? It's as idiotic a habit as taking snuff to make oneself sneeze."
"That's rather a severe way of looking at the subject," said Angus.
"It's a practical way, that's all. My wife surfeits herself with poetry. She is stuffed with Tennyson and Browning, loaded to the very muzzle with Byron and Shelley. She reads Shakespeare as devoutly as she reads her Bible. But I don't see that it helps to make her pleasant company for her husband or her friends. She is never so happy as when she has her nose in a book; give her a bundle of books and a candle and she would be happy in the little house on the top of Willapark."
"Not without you and her boy," said Dopsy, gushingly. "She could never exist without you two."
Mr. Tregonell lit himself another cigar, and strolled off without a word.
"He has not lovable manners, has he?" inquired Dopsy, with her childish air; "but he is so good-hearted."
"No doubt. You have known him some time, haven't you?" inquired Angus, who had been struggling with an uncomfortable yearning to kick the Squire into the Bay.
The scene offered such temptations. They were standing on the edge of the amphitheatre, the ground shelving steeply downward in front of them, rocks and water below. And to think that she—his dearest, she, all gentleness and refinement, was mated to this coarse clay! Was King Marc such an one as this he wondered, and if he were, who could be angry with Tristan—Tristan who died longing to see his lost love—struck to death by his wife's cruel lie—Tristan whose passionate soul passed by metempsychosis into briar and leaf, and crept across the arid rock to meet and mingle with the beloved dead. Oh, how sweet and sad the old legend seemed to Angus to-day, standing above the melancholy sea, where he and she had stood folded in each other's arms in the sweet triumphant moment of love's first avowal.
Dopsy did not allow him much leisure for mournful meditation. She prattled on in that sweetly girlish manner which was meant to be all spirit and sparkle—glancing from theme to theme, like the butterfly among the flowers, and showing a level ignorance on all. Mr. Hamleigh listened with Christian resignation, and even allowed himself to be her escort home—and to seem especially attentive to her at afternoon tea: for although it may take two to make a quarrel, assuredly one, if she be but brazen enough, may make a flirtation. Dopsy felt that time was short, and that strong measures were necessary. Mr. Hamleigh had been very polite—attentive even. Dopsy, accustomed to the free and easy manners of her brother's friends, mistook Mr. Hamleigh's natural courtesy to the sex for particular homage to the individual. But he had "said nothing," and she was no nearer the assurance of becoming Mrs. Hamleigh than she had been on the evening of his arrival. Dopsy had been fain to confess this to Mopsy in the confidence of sisterly discourse.
"It seems as if I might just as well have had a try for him myself, instead of standing out to give you a better chance," retorted Mopsy, somewhat scornfully.
"Go in and win, if you can," said Dopsy. "It won't be the first time you've tried to cut me out."
Dopsy, embittered by the sense of failure, determined on new tactics. Hitherto she had been all sparkle—now she melted into a touching sadness.
"What a delicious old room this is," she murmured, glancing round at the bookshelves and dark panelling, the high wide chimney piece with its coat-of-arms, in heraldic colours, flashing and gleaming against a background of brown oak. "I cannot help feeling wretched at the idea that next week I shall be far away from this dear place—in dingy, dreary London. Oh, Mr. Hamleigh,"—detaining him while she selected one particular piece of sugar from the basin he was handing her—"don't you detest London?"
"Not absolutely. I have sometimes found it endurable."
"Ah, you have your clubs—just the one pleasantest street in all the great overgrown city—and that street lined with palaces, whose doors are always standing open for you. Libraries, smoking rooms, billiard-tables, perfect dinners, and all that is freshest and brightest in the way of society. I don't wonder men like London. But for women it has only two attractions—Mudie, and the shop-windows!"
"And the park—the theatres—the churches—the delight of looking at other women's gowns and bonnets. I thought that could never pall?"
"It does, though. There comes a time when one feels weary of everything," said Dopsy, pensively stirring her tea, and so fixing Mr. Hamleigh with her conversation that he was obliged to linger—yea, even to set down his own teacup on an adjacent table, and to seat himself by the charmer's side.
"I thought you so delighted in the theatres," he said. "You were full of enthusiasm about the drama the night I first dined here."
"Was I?" demanded Dopsy, naïvely. "And now I feel as if I did not care a straw about all the plays that were ever acted—all the actors who ever lived. Strange, is it not, that one can change so, in one little fortnight."
"The change is an hallucination. You are fascinated by the charms of a rural life, which you have not known long enough for satiety. You will be just as fond of plays and players when you get back to London."
"Never," exclaimed Dopsy. "It is not only my taste that is changed. It is myself. I feel as if I were a new creature."
"What a blessing for yourself and society if the change were radical," said Mr. Hamleigh, within himself; and then he answered, lightly.
"Perhaps you have been attending the little chapel at Boscastle, secretly imbibing the doctrines of advanced Methodism, and this is a spiritual awakening."
"No," sighed Dopsy, shaking her head, pensively, as she gazed at her teacup. "It is an utter change. I cannot make it out. I don't think I shall ever care for gaiety—parties—theatres—dress—again."
"Oh, this must be the influence of the Methodists."
"I hate Methodists! I never spoke to one in my life. I should like to go into a convent. I should like to belong to a Protestant sisterhood, and to nurse the poor in their own houses. It would be nasty; I should catch some dreadful complaint, and die, I daresay; but it would be better than what I feel now."
And Dopsy, taking advantage of the twilight, and the fact that she and Angus were at some distance from the rest of the party, burst into tears. They were very real tears—tears of vexation, disappointment, despair; and they made Angus very uncomfortable.
"My dear Miss Vandeleur, I am so sorry to see you distressed. Is there anything on your mind? Is there anything that I can do. Shall I fetch your sister."
"No, no," gasped Dopsy, in a choked voice. "Please don't go away. I like you to be near me."
She put out her hand—a chilly, tremulous hand, with no passion in it save the passionate pain of despair, and touched his, timidly, entreatingly, as if she were calling upon him for pity and help. She was, indeed, in her inmost heart, asking him to rescue her from the great dismal swamp of poverty and disrepute: to take her to himself, and give her a place and status among well-bred people, and make her life worth living.
This was dreadful. Angus Hamleigh, in all the variety of his experience of womankind, had never before found himself face to face with this kind of difficulty. He had not been blind to Miss Vandeleur's strenuous endeavours to charm him. He had parried those light arrows lightly: but he was painfully embarrassed by this appeal to his compassion. It was a new thing for him to sit beside a weeping woman, whom he could neither love nor admire, but from whom he could not withhold his pity.
"I daresay her life is dismal enough," he thought, "with such a brother as Poker Vandeleur—and a father to match."
While he sat in silent embarrassment, and while Dopsy slowly dried her tears with a gaudy little coloured handkerchief, taken from a smart little breast-pocket in the tailor-gown, Mr. Tregonell sauntered across the room to the window where they sat—a Tudor window, with a deep embrasure.
"What are you two talking about in the dark?" he asked, as Dopsy confusedly shuffled the handkerchief back into the breast-pocket. "Something very sentimental, I should think, from the look of you. Poetry, I suppose."
Dopsy said not a word. She believed that Leonard meant well by her—that, if his influence could bring Mr. Hamleigh's nose to the grindstone, to the grindstone that nose would be brought. So she looked up at her brother's friend with a watery smile, and remained mute.
"We were talking about London and the theatres," answered Angus. "Not a very sentimental topic;" and then he got up and walked away with his teacup, to the table near which Christabel was sitting, in the flickering firelight, and seated himself by her side, and began to talk to her about a box of books that had arrived from London that day—books that were familiar to him and new to her. Leonard looked after him with a scowl, safe in the shadow; while Dopsy, feeling that she had made a fool of herself, lapsed again into tears.
"I am afraid he is behaving very badly to you," said Leonard.
"Oh, no, no. But he has such strange ways. He blows hot and cold."
"In plain words, he's a heartless flirt," answered Leonard, impatiently. "He has been fooled by a pack of women—pretends to be dying of consumption—gives himself no end of airs. He has flirted outrageously with you. Has he proposed?"
"No——not exactly," faltered Dopsy.
"Some one ought to bring him to the scratch. Your brother must tackle him."
"Don't you think if—if—Jack were to say anything—were just to hint that I was being made very unhappy—that such marked attentions before all the world put me in a false position—don't you think it might do harm?"
"Quite the contrary. It would do good. No man ought to trifle with a girl's feelings in that way. No man shall be allowed to do it in my house. If Jack won't speak to him, I will."
"Oh, Mr. Vandeleur, what a noble heart you have—what a true friend you have always been to us."
"You are my friend's sister—my wife's guest. I won't see you trifled with."
"And you really think his attentions have been marked?"
"Very much marked. He shall not be permitted to amuse himself at your expense. There he sits, talking sentiment to my wife—just as he has talked sentiment to you. Why doesn't he keep on the safe side, and confine his attentions to married women?"
"You are not jealous of him?" asked Dopsy, with some alarm.
"Jealous! I! It would take a very extraordinary kind of wife, and a very extraordinary kind of admirer of that wife, to makemejealous."
Dopsy felt her hopes in somewise revived by Mr. Tregonell's manner of looking at things. Up to this point she had mistrusted exceedingly that the flirting was all on her side: but now Leonard most distinctly averred that Angus Hamleigh had flirted, and in a manner obvious to every one. And if Mr. Hamleigh really admired her—if he were really blowing hot and cold—inclining one day to make her his wife, and on another day disposed to let her languish and fade in South Belgravia—might not a word or two from a judicious friend turn the scale, and make her happy for life.
She went up to her room to dress in a flutter of hope and fear; so agitated, that she could scarcely manage the more delicate details of her toilet—the drapery of her skirt, the adjustment of the sunflower on her shoulder.
"How flushed and shaky you are," exclaimed Mopsy, pausing in the pencilling of an eyebrow to look at her sister. "Is the deed done? Has he popped?"
"No, he has not popped. But I think he will."
"I wish I were of your opinion. I should like a rich sister. It would be the next best thing to being well off oneself."
"You only think of his money," said Dopsy, who had really fallen in love—for only about the fifteenth time, so there was still freshness in the feeling—"I should care for him just as much if he were a pauper."
"No; you would not," said Mopsy. "I daresay you think you would, but you wouldn't. There is a glamour about money which nobody in our circumstances can resist. A man who dresses perfectly—who has never been hard up—who has always lived among elegant people—there is a style about him that goes straight to one's heart. Don't you remember how in "Peter Wilkins" there are different orders of beings—a superior class—born so, bred so—always apart and above the others. Mr. Hamleigh belongs to that higher order. If he were poor and shabby he would be a different person. You wouldn't care twopence for him."
The Rector of Trevalga and his wife dined at Mount Royal that evening, so Dopsy fell to the lot of Mr. Hamleigh, and had plenty of opportunity of carrying on the siege during dinner, while Mrs. Tregonell and the Rector, who was an enthusiastic antiquarian, talked of the latest discoveries in Druidic remains.
After dinner came the usual adjournment to billiards. The Rector and his wife stayed in the drawing-room with Christabel and Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh would have remained with them, but Leonard specially invited him to the billiard-room.
"You must have had enough Mendelssohn and Beethoven to last you for the next six months," he said. "You had better come and have a smoke with us."
"I could never have too much good music," answered Angus.
"Well, I don't suppose you'd get much to night. The Rector and my wife will talk about pots and pans all the evening, now they've once started. You may as well be sociable, for once-in-a-way, and come with us."
Such an invitation, given in heartiest tones, and with seeming frankness, could hardly be refused. So Angus went across the hall with the rest of the billiard players, to the fine old room, once a chapel, in which there was space enough for settees, and easy chairs, tea-tables, books, flowers, and dogs, without the slightest inconvenience to the players.
"You'll play, Hamleigh?" said Leonard.
"No, thanks; I'd rather sit and smoke and watch you."
"Really! Then Monty and I will play Jack and one of the girls. Billiards is the only game at which one can afford to play against relations—they can't cheat. Mopsy, will you play? Dopsy can mark.'"
"What a thorough good fellow he is," thought Dopsy, charmed with an arrangement which left her comparatively free for flirtation with Mr. Hamleigh, who had taken possession of Christabel's favourite seat—a low capacious basket-chair—by the wide wood fire, and had Christabel's table near him, loaded with her books, and work-basket—those books which were all his favourites as well as hers, and which made an indissoluble link between them. What is mere blood relationship compared with the subtler tie of mutual likings and dislikings?
The men all lighted their cigarettes, and the game progressed with tolerably equal fortunes, Jack Vandeleur playing well enough to make amends for any lack of skill on the part of Mopsy, whose want of the scientific purpose and certainty which come from long experience, was as striking as her dashing and self-assured method of handling her cue, and her free use of all slang terms peculiar to the game. Dopsy oscillated between the marking-board and the fireplace—sometimes kneeling on the Persian rug to play with Randie and the other dogs, sometimes standing in a pensive attitude by the chimney-piece, talking to Angus. All traces of tears were gone. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes brightened by an artful touch of Indian ink under the lashes, her eyebrows accentuated by the same artistic treatment, her large fan held with the true Grosvenor Gallery air.
"Do you believe that peacocks' feathers are unlucky?" she asked, looking pensively at the fringe of green and azure plumage on her fan.
"I am not altogether free from superstition, but my idea of the fates has never taken that particular form. Why should the peacock be a bird of evil omen? I can believe anything bad of the screech-owl or the raven—but the harmless ornamental peacock—surely he is innocent of our woes."
"I have known the most direful calamities follow the introduction of peacocks' feathers into a drawing-room—yet they are so tempting, one can hardly live without them."
"Really! Do you know that I have found existence endurable without so much as a tuft of down from that unmelodious bird?"
"Have you never longed for its plumage to give life and colour to your rooms?—such exquisite colour—such delicious harmony—I wonder that you, who have such artistic taste, can resist the fascination."
"I hope you have not found that pretty fan the cause of many woes?" said Mr. Hamleigh, smilingly, as the damsel posed herself in the early Italian manner, and slowly waved the bright-hued plumage.
"I cannot say that I have been altogether happy since I possessed it," answered Dopsy, with a shy downward glance, and a smothered sigh; "and yet I don't know—I have been only too happy sometimes, perhaps, and at other times deeply wretched."
"Is not that kind of variableness common to our poor human nature—independent of peacocks' feathers?"
"Not to me. I used to be the most thoughtless happy-go-lucky creature."
"Until when?"