The inquest at the Wharncliffe Arms was conducted in a thoroughly respectable, unsuspicious manner. No searching questions were asked, no inferences drawn. To the farmers and tradespeople who constituted that rustic jury, the case seemed too simple to need any severe interrogation. A gentleman staying in a country house goes out shooting, and is so unlucky as to shoot himself instead of the birds whereof he went in search. He is found with an empty bag, and a charge of swan-shot through his heart.
"Hard lines," as Jack Vandeleur observed,sotto voce, to a neighbouring squire, while the inquest was pursuing its sleepy course, "and about the queerest fluke I ever saw on any table."
"Was it a fluke?" muttered little Montagu, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the proceedings. He and his companions were standing among a little crowd at the door of the justice-room. "It looks to me uncommonly as if Mr. Hamleigh had shot himself. We all know he was deadly sweet on Mrs. T., although both of them behaved beautifully."
"Men have died—and worms have eaten them—but not for love," quoted Captain Vandeleur, who had a hearsay knowledge of Shakspeare, though he had never read a Shakspearian play in his life. "If Hamleigh was so dead tired of life that he wanted to kill himself he could have done it comfortably in his own room."
"He might wish to avoid the imputation of suicide."
"Pshaw, how can any man care what comes afterwards? Bury me where four roads meet, with a stake through my body, or in Westminster Abbey under a marble monument, and the result is just the same to me."
"That's because you are an out-and-out Bohemian. But Hamleigh was a dandy in all things. He would be nice about the details of his death."
Mr. Hamleigh's valet was now being questioned as to his master's conduct and manner on the morning he left Mount Royal. The man replied that his master's manner had been exactly the same as usual. He was always very quiet—said no more than was necessary to be said. He was a kind master but never familiar. "He never made a companion of me," said the man, "though I'd been with him at home and abroad twelve years; but a better master never lived. He was always an early riser—there was nothing out of the way in his getting up at six, and going out at seven. There was only one thing at all out of the common, and that was his attending to his gun himself, instead of telling me to get it ready for him."
"Had he many guns with him?"
"Only two. The one he took was an old gun—a favourite."
"Do you know why he took swan-shot to shoot woodcocks?"
"No—unless he made a mistake in the charge. He took the cartridges out of the case himself, and put them into his pocket. He was an experienced sportsman, though he was never as fond of sport as the generality of gentlemen."
"Do you know if he had been troubled in mind of late?"
"No; I don't think he had any trouble on his mind. He was in very bad health, and knew that he had not long to live; but he seemed quite happy and contented. Indeed, judging by what I saw of him, I should say that he was in a more easy, contented frame of mind during the last few months than he had ever been for the last four years."
This closed the examination. There had been very few witnesses called—only the medical man, the men who had found the body, the girl at the farm, who declared that she had given the key to Mr. Hamleigh a little before eight that morning, that no one else had asked for the key till the men came from Mount Royal—that, to her knowledge, no one but the men at work on the farm had gone up the lane that morning. A couple of farm labourers gave the same testimony—they had been at work in the topmost field all the morning, and no one had gone to the Kieve that way except the gentleman that was killed. They had heard a shot—or two shots—they were not certain which, fired between eight and nine. They were not very clear as to the hour, and they could not say for certain whether they heard one or two shots; but they knew that the report was a very loud one—unusually loud for a sportsman's shot.
Mr. Tregonell, although he was in the room ready to answer any questions, was not interrogated. The jury went in a wagonette to see the body, which was still lying at the farm, and returned after a brief inspection of that peaceful clay—the countenance wearing that beautiful calm which is said to be characteristic of death from a gun-shot wound—to give their verdict.
"Death by misadventure."
The body was carried to Mount Royal after dark, and three days later there was a stately funeral, to which first cousins and second cousins of the dead came as from the four corners of the earth; for Angus Hamleigh, dying a bachelor, and leaving a handsome estate behind him, was a person to be treated with all those last honours which affectionate kindred can offer to poor humanity.
He was buried in the little churchyard in the hollow, where Christabel and he had heard the robin singing and the dull thud of the earth thrown out of an open grave in the calm autumn sunlight. Now in the autumn his own grave was dug in the same peaceful spot—in accordance with a note which his valet, who knew his habits, found in a diary.
"Oct. 11.—If I should die in Cornwall—and there are times when I feel as if death were nearer than my doctor told me at our last interview—I should like to be buried in Minster Churchyard. I have outlived all family associations, and I should like to lie in a spot which is dear to me for its own sake."
A will had been found in Mr. Hamleigh's despatch box, which receptacle was opened by his lawyer, who came from London on purpose to take charge of any papers which his client might have in his possession at the time of his death. The bulk of his papers were no doubt in his chambers in the Albany; chambers which he had taken on coming of age; and which he had occupied at intervals ever since.
Mr. Tregonell showed himself keenly anxious that everything should be done in a strictly legal manner, and it was by his own hand that the lawyer was informed of his client's death, and invited to Mount Royal. Mr. Bryanstone, the solicitor, a thorough man of the world, and an altogether agreeable person, appeared at the Manor House two days before the funeral, and, being empowered by Mr. Tregonell to act as he pleased, sent telegrams far and wide to the dead man's kindred, who came trooping like carrion crows to the funeral feast.
Angus Hamleigh was buried in the afternoon; a mild, peaceful afternoon at the end of October, with a yellow light in the western sky, which deepened and brightened as the funeral train wound across the valley, climbed the steep street of Boscastle, and then wound slowly downwards into the green heart of the hill, to the little rustic burial place. That orb of molten gold was sinking behind the edge of the moor just when the Vicar read the last words of the funeral service. Golden and crimson gleams touched the landscape here and there, golden lights still lingered on the sea, as the mourners, so thoroughly formal and conventional for the most part—Jack Vandeleur and little Monty amidst the train with carefully-composed features—went back to their carriages. And then the shades of evening came slowly down, and spread a dark pall over hill-side, and hedgerow, and churchyard, where there was no sound but the monotonous fall of the earth, which the gravedigger was shovelling into that new grave.
There had been no women at the funeral. Those two who, each after her own peculiar fashion, had loved the dead man, were shut in their own rooms, thinking of him, picturing, with too vivid imagery, the lowering of the coffin in the new-made grave—hearing the solemn monotony of the clergyman's voice, sounding clear in the clear air—the first shovelful of earth falling on the coffin-lid—dust to dust; dust to dust.
Lamps were lighted in the drawing-room, where the will was to be read. A large wood fire burned brightly—pleasant after the lowered atmosphere of evening. Wines and other refreshments stood on a table near the hearth; another table stood ready for the lawyer. So far as there could be, or ought to be, comfort and cheeriness on so sad an occasion, comfort and cheeriness were here. The cousins—first and second—warmed themselves before the fire, and discoursed in low murmurs of the time and the trouble it had cost them to reach this out of the way hole, and discussed the means of getting away from it. Mr. Tregonell stood on one side of the hearth, leaning his broad back heavily against the sculptured chimney piece, and listening moodily to Captain Vandeleur's muttered discourse. He had insisted upon keeping his henchman with him during this gloomy period; sending an old servant as far as Plymouth to see the Miss Vandeleurs into the London train, rather than part with his familiar friend. Even Mr. Montagu, who had delicately hinted at departure, was roughly bidden to remain.
"I shall be going away myself in a week or so," said Mr. Tregonell. "I don't mean to spend the winter at this fag-end of creation. It will be time enough for you to go when I go."
The friends, enjoying free quarters which were excellent in their way, and having no better berths in view, freely forgave the bluntness of the invitation, and stayed. But they commented between themselves in the seclusion of the smoking room upon the Squire's disinclination to be left without cheerful company.
"He's infernally nervous, that's what it all means," said little Monty, who had all that cock-sparrowish pluck which small men are wont to possess—the calm security of insignificance. "You wouldn't suppose a great burly fellow like Tregonell, who has travelled all over the world, would be scared by a death in his house, would you?"
"Death is awful, let it come when it will," answered Jack Vandeleur, dubiously. "I've seen plenty of hard-hitting in the hill-country, but I'd go a long way to avoid seeing a strange dog die, let alone a dog I was fond of."
"Tregonell couldn't have been very fond of Hamleigh, that's certain," said Monty.
"They seemed good friends."
"Seemed; yes. But do you suppose Tregonell ever forgot that Mr. Hamleigh and his wife had once been engaged to be married? It isn't in human nature to forget that kind of thing. And he made believe that he asked Hamleigh here to give one of your sisters a chance of getting a rich husband," said Monty, rolling up a cigarette, as he sat adroitly balanced on the arm of a large chair, and shaking his head gently, with lowered eyelids, and a cynical smile curling his thin lips. "That was a littletoothin. He asked Hamleigh here because he was savagely jealous, and suspected his motive for turning up in this part of the country, and wanted to see how he and Mrs. Tregonell would carry on."
"Whatever he wanted, I'm sure he saw no harm in either of them," said Captain Vandeleur. "I'm as quick as any man at twigging that kind of thing, and I'll swear that it was all fair and above board with those two; they behaved beautifully."
"So they did, poor things," answered Monty, in his little purring way. "And yet Tregonell wasn't happy."
"He'd have been better pleased if Hamleigh had proposed to my sister, as he ought to have done," said Vandeleur, trying to look indignant at the memory of Dopsy's wrongs.
"Now drop that, old Van," said Monty, laughing softly and pleasantly, as he lit his cigarette, and began to smoke, dreamily, daintily, like a man for whom smoking is a fine art. "Sink your sister. As I said before, that's too thin. Dopsy is a dear little girl—one of the five or six and twenty nice girls whom I passionately adore; but she was never anywhere within range of Hamleigh. First and foremost she isn't his style, and secondly he has never got over the loss of Mrs. Tregonell. He behaved beautifully while he was here; but he was just as much in love with her as he was four years ago, when I used to meet them at dances—a regular pair of Arcadian lovers; Daphne and Chloe, and that kind of thing. She only wanted a crook to make the picture perfect."
And now Mr. Bryanstone had hummed and hawed a little, and had put on a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, and cousins near and distant ceased their conversational undertones, and seated themselves conveniently to listen.
The will was brief. "To Percy Ritherdon, Commander in Her Majesty's Navy, my first cousin and old schoolfellow, in memory of his dear mother's kindness to one who had no mother, I bequeath ten thousand pounds, and my sapphire ring, which has been an heirloom, and which I hope he will leave to any son of his whom he may call after me.
"To my servant, John Danby, five hundred pounds in consols.
"To my housekeeper in the Albany, two hundred and fifty.
"To James Bryanstone, my very kind friend and solicitor of Lincoln's Inn, my collection of gold and silver snuff-boxes, and Roman intaglios.
"All the rest of my estate, real and personal, to be vested in trustees, of whom the above-mentioned James Bryanstone shall be one, and the Rev. John Carlyon, of Trevena, Cornwall, the other, for the sole use and benefit of Leonard George Tregonell, now an infant, who shall, with his father and mother's consent, assume the name of Hamleigh after that of Tregonell upon coming of age, and I hope that his father and mother will accept this legacy for their son in the spirit of pure friendship for them, and attachment to the boy by which it is dictated, and that they will suffer their son so to perpetuate the name of one who will die childless."
There was an awful silence—perfect collapse on the part of the cousins, the one kinsman selected for benefaction being now with his ship in the Mediterranean.
And then Leonard Tregonell rose from his seat by the fire, and came close up to the table at which Mr. Bryanstone was sitting.
"Am I at liberty to reject that legacy on my son's part?" he asked.
"Certainly not. The money is left in trust. Your son can do what he likes when he comes of age. But why should you wish to decline such a legacy—left in such friendly terms? Mr. Hamleigh was your friend."
"He was my mother's friend—for me only a recent acquaintance. It seems to me that there is a sort of indirect insult in such a bequest, as if I were unable to provide for my boy—as if I were likely to run through everything, and make him a pauper before he comes of age."
"Believe me there is no such implication," said the lawyer, smiling blandly at the look of trouble and anger in the other man's face. "Did you never hear before of money being left to a man who already has plenty? That is the general bent of all legacies. In this world it is the poor who are sent empty away," murmured Mr. Bryanstone, with a sly glance under his spectacles at the seven blank faces of the seven cousins. "I consider that Mr. Hamleigh—who was my very dear friend—has paid you the highest compliment in his power, and that you have every reason to honour his memory."
"And legally I have no power to refuse his property?"
"Certainly not. The estate is not left to you—you have no power to touch a sixpence of it."
"And the will is dated?"
"Just three weeks ago."
"Within the first week of this visit here. He must have taken an inordinate fancy to my boy."
Mr. Bryanstone smiled to himself softly with lowered eyelids, as he folded up the will—a holograph will upon a single sheet of Bath post—witnessed by two of the Mount Royal servants. The family solicitor knew all about Angus Hamleigh's engagement to Miss Courtenay—had even received instructions for drawing the marriage settlement—but he was too much a man of the world to refer to that fact.
"Was not Mr. Hamleigh's father engaged to your mother?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Then don't you think that respect for your mother may have had some influence with Mr. Hamleigh when he made your son his heir?"
"I am not going to speculate about his motives. I only wish he had left his money to an asylum for idiots—or to his cousins"—with a glance at the somewhat vacuous countenances of the dead man's kindred, "or that I were at liberty to decline his gift—which I should do, flatly."
"This sounds as if you were prejudiced against my lamented friend. I thought you liked him."
"So I did," stammered Leonard, "but not well enough to give him the right to patronise me with his d—d legacy."
"Mr. Tregonell," said the lawyer, frowning, "I have to remind you that my late client has left you, individually, nothing—and I must add, that your language and manner are most unbefitting this melancholy occasion."
Leonard grumbled an inaudible reply, and walked back to the fireplace. The whole of this conversation had been carried on in undertones—so that the cousins who had gathered in a group upon the hearthrug, and who were for the most part absorbed in pensive reflections upon the futility of earthly hopes, heard very little of it. They belonged to that species of well-dressed nonentities, more or less impecunious, which sometimes constitute the outer fringe upon a good old family. To each of them it seemed a hard thing that Angus Hamleigh had not remembered him individually, choosing him out of the ruck of cousinship as a meet object for bounty.
"He ought to have left me an odd thousand," murmured a beardless subaltern; "he knew how badly I wanted it, for I borrowed a pony of him the last time he asked me to breakfast; and a man of good family must be very hard up when he comes to borrowing ponies."
"I dare say you would have not demurred to making it a monkey, if Mr. Hamleigh had proposed it," said his interlocutor.
"Of course not: and if he had been generous he would have given me something handsome, instead of being so confoundedly literal as to write his cheque for exactly the amount I asked for. A man of his means and age ought to have had more feeling for a young fellow in his first season. And now I am out of pocket for my expenses to this infernal hole."
Thus, and with other wailings of an approximate character, did Angus Hamleigh's kindred make their lamentation: and then they all began to arrange among themselves for getting away as early as possible next morning—and for travelling together, with a distant idea of a little "Nap" to beguile the weariness of the way between Plymouth and Paddington. There was room enough for them all at Mount Royal, and Mr. Tregonell was not a man to permit any guests, howsoever assembled, to leave his house for the shelter of an inn; so the cousins stayed, dined heavily, smoked as furiously as those furnace chimneys which are supposed not to smoke, all the evening, and thought they were passing virtuous for refraining from the relaxation of pool, or shell-out—opining that the click of the balls might have an unholy sound so soon after a funeral. Debarred from this amusement, they discussed the career and character of the dead man, and were all agreed, in the friendliest spirit, that there had been very little in him, and that he had made a poor thing of his life, and obtained a most inadequate amount of pleasure out of his money.
Mount Royal was clear of them all by eleven o'clock next morning. Mr. Montagu went away with them, and only Captain Vandeleur remained to bear Leonard company in a house which now seemed given over to gloom. Christabel kept her room, with Jessie Bridgeman in constant attendance upon her. She had not seen her husband since her return from the Kieve, and Jessie had told him in a few resolute words that it would not be well for them to meet.
"She is very ill," said Jessie, standing on the threshold of the room, while Leonard remained in the corridor outside. "Dr. Hayle has seen her, and he says she must have perfect quiet—no one is to worry her—no one is to talk to her—the shock she has suffered in this dreadful business has shattered her nerves."
"Why can't you say in plain words that she is grieving for the only man she ever loved," asked Leonard.
"I am not going to say that which is not true; and which you, better than any one else, know is not true. It is not Angus Hamleigh's death, but the manner of his death, which she feels. Take that to your heart, Mr. Tregonell."
"You are a viper!" said Leonard, "and you always were a viper. Tell my wife—when she is well enough to hear reason—that I am not going to be sat upon by her, or her toady; and that as she is going to spend her winter dissolved in tears for Mr. Hamleigh's death, I shall spend mine in South America, with Jack Vandeleur."
Three days later his arrangements were all made for leaving Cornwall. Captain Vandeleur was very glad to go with him, upon what he, Jack, pleasantly called "reciprocal terms," Mr. Tregonell paying all expenses as a set-off against his friend's cheerful society. There was no false pride about Poker Vandeleur; no narrow-minded dislike to being paid for. He was so thoroughly assured as to the perfect equitableness of the transaction.
On the morning he left Mount Royal, Mr. Tregonell went into the nursery to bid his son good-bye. He contrived, by some mild artifice, to send the nurse on an errand; and while she was away, strained the child to his breast, and hugged and kissed him with a rough fervour which he had never before shown. The boy quavered a little, and his lip drooped under that rough caress—and then the clear blue eyes looked up and saw that this vehemence meant love, and the chubby arms clung closely round the father's neck.
"Poor little beggar!" muttered Leonard, his eyes clouded with tears. "I wonder whether I shall ever see him again. He might die—or I—there is no telling. Hard lines to leave him for six months on end—but"—with a suppressed shudder—"I should go mad if I stayed here."
The nurse came back, and Leonard put the child on his rocking-horse, which he had left reluctantly at the father's entrance, and left the nursery without another word. In the corridor he lingered for some minutes—now staring absently at the family portraits—now looking at the door of his wife's room. He had been occupying a bachelor room at the other end of the house since her illness.
Should he force an entrance to that closed chamber—defy Jessie Bridgeman, and take leave of his wife?—the wife whom, after the bent of his own nature, he had passionately loved. What could he say to her? Very little, in his present mood. What would she say to him? There was the rub. From that pale face—from those uplifted eyes—almost as innocent as the eyes that had looked at him just now—he shrank in absolute fear.
At the last moment, after he had put on his overcoat, and when the dog-cart stood waiting for him at the door, he sat down and scribbled a few hasty lines of farewell.
"I am told you are too ill to see me, but cannot go without one word of good-bye. If I thought you cared a rap for me, I should stay; but I believe you have set yourself against me because of this man's death, and that you will get well all the sooner for my being far away. Perhaps six months hence, when I come back again—if I don't get killed out yonder, which is always on the cards—you may have learnt to feel more kindly towards me. God knows I have loved you as well as ever man loved woman—too well for my own happiness. Good-bye. Take care of the boy; and don't let that little viper, Jessie Bridgeman, poison your mind against me."
"Leonard! are you coming to-day or to-morrow?" cried Jack Vandeleur's stentorian voice from the hall. "We shall lose the train at Launceston, if you don't look sharp."
Thus summoned, Leonard thrust his letter into an envelope, directed it to his wife, and gave it to Daniel, who was hovering about to do due honour to his master's departure—the master for whose infantine sports he had made his middle-aged back as the back of a horse, and perambulated the passages on all-fours, twenty years ago—the master who seemed but too likely to bring his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave, judging by the pace at which he now appeared to be travelling along the road to ruin.
Now came a period of gloom and solitude at Mount Royal. Mrs. Tregonell lived secluded in her own rooms, rarely leaving them save to visit her boy in his nursery, or to go for long lonely rambles with Miss Bridgeman. The lower part of the house was given over to silence and emptiness. It was winter, and the roads were not inviting for visitors; so, after a few calls had been made by neighbours who lived within ten miles or so, and those callers had been politely informed by Daniel that his mistress was confined to her room by a severe cough, and was not well enough to see any one, no more carriages drove up the long avenue, and the lodge-keeper's place became a sinecure, save for opening the gate in the morning, and shutting it at dusk.
Mrs. Tregonell neither rode nor drove, and the horses were only taken out of their stables to be exercised by grooms and underlings. The servants fell into the way of living their own lives, almost as if they had been on board wages in the absence of the family. The good old doctor, who had attended Christabel in all her childish illnesses, came twice a week, and stayed an hour or so in the morning-room upstairs, closeted with his patient and her companion, and then looked at little Leo in his nursery, that young creature growing and thriving exceedingly amidst the gloom and silence of the house, and awakening the echoes occasionally with bursts of baby mirth.
None of the servants knew exactly what was amiss with Mrs. Tregonell. Jessie guarded and fenced her in with such jealous care, hardly letting any other member of the household spend five minutes in her company. They only knew that she was very white, very sad-looking; that it was with the utmost difficulty she was persuaded to take sufficient nourishment to sustain life; and that her only recreation consisted in those long walks with Jessie—walks which they took in all weathers, and sometimes at the strangest hours. The people about Boscastle grew accustomed to the sight of those two solitary women, clad in dark cloth ulsters, with close-fitting felt hats, that defied wind and weather, armed with sturdy umbrellas, tramping over fields and commons, by hilly paths, through the winding valley where the stream ran loud and deep after the autumn rains, on the cliffs above the wild grey sea—always avoiding as much as possible all beaten tracks, and the haunts of mankind. Those who did meet the two reported that there was something strange in the looks and ways of both. They did not talk to each other as most ladies talked, to beguile the way: they marched on in silence—the younger, fairer face pale as death and inexpressibly sad, and with a look as of one who walks in her sleep, with wide-open, unseeing eyes.
"She looks just like a person who might walk over the cliff, if there was no one by to take care of her," said Mrs. Penny, the butcher's wife, who had met them one day on her way home from Camelford Market; "but Miss Bridgeman, she do take such care, and she do watch every step of young Mrs. Tregonell's"—Christabel was always spoken of as young Mrs. Tregonell by those people who had known her aunt. "I'm afraid the poor dear lady has gone a little wrong in her head since Mr. Hamleigh shot himself; and there are some as do think he shot himself for her sake, never having got over her marrying our Squire."
On many a winter evening, when the sea ran high and wild at the foot of the rocky promontory, and overhead a wilder sky seemed like another tempestuous sea inverted, those two women paced the grass-grown hill at Tintagel, above the nameless graves, among the ruins of prehistorical splendour.
They were not always silent, as they walked slowly to and fro among the rank grass, or stood looking at those wild waves which came rolling in like solid walls of shining black water, to burst into ruin with a thunderous roar against the everlasting rocks. They talked long and earnestly in this solitude, and in other solitary spots along that wild and varied coast; but none but themselves ever knew what they talked about, or what was the delight and relief which they found in the dark grandeur of that winter sky and sea. And so the months crept by, in a dreary monotony, and it was spring once more; all the orchards full of bloom—those lovely little orchards of Alpine Boscastle, here nestling in the deep gorge, there hanging on the edge of the hill. The gardens were golden with daffodils, tulips, narcissus, jonquil—that rich variety of yellow blossoms which come in early spring, like a floral sunrise—and the waves ran gently into the narrow inlet between the tall cliffs. But those two lonely women were no longer seen roaming over the hills, or sitting down to rest in some sheltered corner of Pentargon Bay. They had gone to Switzerland, taking the nurse and baby with them, and were not expected to return to Mount Royal till the autumn.
Mr. Tregonell's South American wanderings had lasted longer than he had originally contemplated. His latest letters—brief scrawls, written at rough resting-places—announced a considerable extension of his travels. He and his friend were following in the footsteps of Mr. Whymper, on the Equatorial Andes, the backbone of South America. Dopsy and Mopsy were moping in the dusty South Belgravian lodging-house, nursing their invalid father, squabbling with their landlady, cutting, contriving, straining every nerve to make sixpences go as far as shillings, and only getting outside glimpses of the world of pleasure and gaiety, art and fashion, in their weary trampings up and down the dusty pathways of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
They had written three or four times to Mrs. Tregonell, letters running over with affection, fondly hoping for an invitation to Mount Royal; but the answers had been in Jessie Bridgeman's hand, and the last had come from Zurich, which seemed altogether hopeless. They had sent Christmas cards and New Year's cards, and had made every effort, compatible with their limited means, to maintain the links of friendship.
"I wish we could afford to send her a New Year's gift, or a toy for that baby," said Mopsy, who was not fond of infants. "But what could we send her that she would care for, when she has everything in this world that is worth having. And we could not get a toy, which that pampered child would think worth looking at, under a sovereign," concluded Mop, with a profound sigh.
And so the year wore on, dry, and dreary, and dusty for the two girls, whose only friends were the chosen few whom their brother made known to them—friends who naturally dropped out of their horizon in Captain Vandeleur's absence.
"What a miserable summer it has been," said Dopsy, yawning and stretching in her tawdry morning gown—one of last year's high-art tea gowns—and surveying with despondent eye the barren breakfast-table, where two London eggs, and the remains of yesterday's loaf, flanked by a nearly empty marmalade pot, comprised all the temptations of the flesh. "What a wretched summer—hot, and sultry, and thundery, and dusty—the cholera raging in Chelsea, and measles only divided from us by Lambeth Bridge! And we have not been to a single theatre."
"Or tasted a single French dinner."
"Or been given a single pair of gloves."
"Hark!" cried Mopsy, "it's the postman," and she rushed into the passage, too eager to await the maid-of-all-work's slipshod foot.
"What's the good of exciting oneself?" murmured Dopsy, with another stretch of long thin arms above a towzled head. "Of course it's only a bill, or a lawyer's letter for pa."
Happily it was neither of these unpleasantnesses which the morning messenger had brought, but a large vellum envelope, with the address, Mount Royal, in old English letters above the small neat seal: and the hand which had directed the envelope was Christabel Tregonell's.
"At last she has condescended to write to me with her own hand," said Dopsy, to whom, as Miss Vandeleur, the letter was addressed. "But I dare say it's only a humbugging note. I know she didn't really like us: we are not her style."
"How should we be?" exclaimed Mopsy, whom the languid influences of a sultry August had made ill-humoured and cynical. "Shewas not brought up in the gutter."
"Mopsy," cried her sister, with a gasp of surprise and delight, "it's an invitation!"
"What?"
"Listen—
"'Dear Miss Vandeleur,—"'We have just received a telegram from Buenos Ayres. Mr. Tregonell and Captain Vandeleur leave that port for Plymouth this afternoon, and will come straight from Plymouth here. I think you would both wish to meet your brother on his arrival; and I know Mr. Tregonell is likely to want to keep him here for some time. Will you, therefore, come to us early next week, so as to be here to welcome the travellers?"'Very sincerely yours,"'Christabel Tregonell.'"
"'Dear Miss Vandeleur,—
"'We have just received a telegram from Buenos Ayres. Mr. Tregonell and Captain Vandeleur leave that port for Plymouth this afternoon, and will come straight from Plymouth here. I think you would both wish to meet your brother on his arrival; and I know Mr. Tregonell is likely to want to keep him here for some time. Will you, therefore, come to us early next week, so as to be here to welcome the travellers?
"'Very sincerely yours,
"'Christabel Tregonell.'"
"This is too delicious," exclaimed Dopsy. "But however are we to find the money for the journey? And our clothes—what a lot we shall have to do to our clothes. If we only had credit at a good draper's."
"Suppose we were to try our landlady's plan, for once in a way," suggested Mopsy, faintly, "and get a few things from that man near Drury Lane who takes weekly instalments."
"What, the Tallyman?" screamed Dopsy. "No, I would rather be dressed like a South Sea Islander. It's not only the utter lowness of the thing; but the man's goods are never like anybody else's. The colours and materials seem invented on purpose for him."
"That might pass for high art."
"Well, they're ugly enough even for that; but it's not the right kind of ugliness."
"After all," answered Mopsy, "we have no more chance of paying weekly than we have of paying monthly or quarterly. Nothing under three years' credit would be any use tous. Something might happen—Fortune's wheel might turn in three years."
"Whenever it does turn it will be the wrong way, and we shall be under it," said Dopsy, still given over to gloom.
It was very delightful to be invited to a fine old country house; but it was bitter to know that one must go there but half provided with those things which civilization have made a necessity.
"How happy those South Sea Islanders must be," sighed Mopsy, pensively meditating upon the difference between wearing nothing, and having nothing to wear.
The Buenos Ayres steamer was within sight of land—English land. Those shining lights yonder were the twin lanterns of the Lizard. Leonard and his friend paced the bridge smoking their cigars, and looking towards that double star which shone out as one light in the distance; and thinking that they were going back to civilization—conventional habits—a world which must seem cramped and narrow—not much better than the squirrel's cage seems to the squirrel—after the vast width and margin of that wilder, freer world they had just left—where men and women were not much more civilized than the unbroken horses that were brought out struggling, and roped in among a team of older stagers, to be dragged along anyhow for the first mile or so, rebellious, and wondering, and to fall in with the necessities of the case somehow before the stage was done.
There was no thrill of patriotic rapture in the breast of either traveller as he watched yonder well-known light brightening on the dark horizon. Leonard had left his country too often to feel any deep emotion at returning to it. He had none of those strong feelings which mark a man as the son of the soil, and make it seem to him that he belongs to one spot of earth, and can neither live nor die happily anywhere else. The entire globe was his country, a world created for him to roam about in, climbing all its hills, shooting in all its forests, fishing in all its rivers, exhausting all the sport and amusement that was to be had out of it—and with no anchor to chain him down to any given spot. Yet, though he had none of the deep feeling of the exile returning to the country of his birth, he was not without emotion as he saw the Lizard light broadening and yellowing under the pale beams of a young moon. He was thinking of his wife—the wife whose face he had not seen since that gloomy morning at Mount Royal, when she sat pale and calm in her place at the head of his table—maintaining her dignity as the mistress of his house, albeit he knew her heart was breaking. From the hour of her return from the Kieve, they had been parted. She had kept her room, guarded by Jessie; and he had been told, significantly, that it was not well they should meet.
How would she receive him now? What were her thoughts and feelings about that dead man? The man whom she had loved and he had hated: not only because his wife loved him—though that reason was strong enough for hatred—but because the man was in every attribute so much his own superior. Never had Leonard Tregonell felt such keen anxiety as he felt now, when he speculated upon his wife's greeting—when he tried to imagine how they two would feel and act standing face to face after nearly a year of severance.
The correspondence between them had been of the slightest. For the first six months his only home-letters had been from Miss Bridgeman—curt, business-like communications—telling him of his boy's health and general progress, and of any details about the estate which it was his place to be told. Of Christabel she wrote as briefly as possible. "Mrs. Tregonell is a little better." "Mrs. Tregonell is gradually regaining strength." "The doctor considers Mrs. Tregonell much improved," and so on.
Later there had been letters from Christabel—letters written in Switzerland—in which the writer confined herself almost entirely to news of the boy's growth and improvement, and to the particulars of their movements from one place to another—letters which gave not the faintest indication of the writer's frame of mind: as devoid of sentiment as an official communication from one legation to another.
He was going back to Mount Royal therefore in profound ignorance of his wife's feelings—whether he would be received with smiles or frowns, with tears or sullen gloom. Albeit not of a sensitive nature, this uncertainty made him uncomfortable, and he looked at yonder faint grey shore—the peaks and pinnacles of that wild western coast—without any of those blissful emotions which the returning wanderer always experiences—in poetry.
Plymouth, however, where they went ashore next morning, seemed a very enjoyable place after the cities of South America. It was not so picturesque a town, nor had it that rowdy air and dissipated flavour which Mr. Tregonell appreciated in the cities of the South; but it had a teeming life and perpetual movement, which were unknown on the shores of the Pacific; the press and hurry of many industries—the steady fervour of a town where wealth is made by honest labour—the intensity of a place which is in somewise the cradle of naval warfare. Mr. Tregonell breakfasted and lunched at the Duke of Cornwall, strolled on the Hoe, played two or three games on the first English billiard-table he had seen for a year, and found a novel delight in winners and losers.
An afternoon train took the travellers on to Launceston, where the Mount Royal wagonette, and a cart for the luggage, were waiting for them at the station.
"Everything right at the Mount?" asked Leonard, as Nicholls touched his hat.
"Yes, Sir."
He asked for no details, but took the reins from Nicholls without another word. Captain Vandeleur jumped up by his side, Nicholls got in at the back, with a lot of the smaller luggage—gun-cases, dressing-bags, despatch-boxes—and away they went up the castle hill, and then sharp round to the right, and off at a dashing pace along the road to the moor. It was a two hours' drive even for the best goers; but Mr. Tregonell spoke hardly a dozen times during the journey, smoking all the way, and with his eyes always on his horses.
At last they wound up the hill to Mount Royal, and passed the lodge, and saw all the lights of the old wide-spreading Tudor front shining upon them through the thickening grey of early evening.
"A good old place, isn't it?" said Leonard, just a little moved at sight of the house in which he had been born. "A man might come home to a worse shelter."
"This man might come home to lodgings in Chelsea," said Jack Vandeleur, touching himself lightly on the breast, with a grim laugh. "It's a glorious old place, and you needn't apologize for being proud of it. And now we've come back, I hope you are going to be jolly, for you've been uncommonly glum while we've been away. The house looks cheerful, doesn't it? I should think it must be full of company."
"Not likely," answered Leonard. "Christabel never cared about having people. We should have lived like hermits if she had had her way."
"Then if the house isn't full of people, all I can say is there's a good deal of candlelight going to waste," said Captain Vandeleur.
They were driving up to the porch by this time; the door stood wide open; servants were on the watch for them. The hall was all aglow with light and fire; people were moving about near the hearth. It was a relief to Leonard to see this life and brightness. He had feared to find a dark and silent house—a melancholy welcome—all things still in mourning for the untimely dead.
A ripple of laughter floated from the hall as Leonard drew up his horses, and two tall slim figures with fluffy heads, short-waisted gowns, and big sashes, came skipping down the broad shallow steps.
"My sisters, by Jove," cried Jack, delighted. "How awfully jolly of Mrs. Tregonell to invite them."
Leonard's only salutation to the damsels was a friendly nod. He brushed by them as they grouped themselves about their brother—like a new edition of Laocoon without the snakes, or the three Graces without the grace—and hurried into the hall, eager to be face to face with his wife. She came forward to meet him, looking her loveliest, dressed as he had never seen her dressed before, with a style, achic, and a daring more appropriate to the Théâtre Français than to a Cornish squire's house. She who, even in the height of the London season, had been simplicity itself, recalling to those who most admired her, the picture of that chaste and unworldly maiden who dwelt beside the Dove, now wore an elaborate costume of brown velvet and satin, in which a Louis Quinze velvet coat, with large cut-steel buttons and Mechlinjabot, was the most striking feature. Her fair, soft hair was now fluffy, and stood up in an infinity of frizzy curls from the broad white forehead. Diamond solitaires flashed in her ears, her hands glittered with the rainbow light of old family rings, which in days gone by she had been wont to leave in the repose of an iron safe. The whole woman was changed. She came to meet her husband with a Society smile; shook hands with him as if he had been a commonplace visitor—he was too startled to note the death-like coldness of that slender hand—and welcomed him with a conventional inquiry about his passage from Buenos Ayres.
He stood transfixed—overwhelmed by surprise. The room was full of people. There was Mrs. Fairfax Torrington, liveliest and most essentially modern of well-preserved widows, alwaysdans le mouvement, as she said of herself; and there, lolling against the high oak chimney-piece, with an air of fatuous delight in his own attractiveness, was that Baron de Cazalet—pseudo artist, poet, andlittérateur, who, five seasons ago, had been an object of undisguised detestation with Christabel. He, too, was essentially in the movement—æsthetic, cynical, agnostic, thought-reading, spiritualistic—always blowing the last fashionable bubble, and making his bubbles bigger and brighter than other people's—a man who prided himself upon his "intensity" in every pursuit—from love-making to gourmandize. There, again, marked out from the rest by a thoroughly prosaic air, which, in these days of artistic sensationalism is in itself a distinction—pale, placid, taking his ease in a low basket chair, with his languid hand on Randie's black muzzle—sat Mr. FitzJesse, the journalist, proprietor and editor ofThe Sling, a fashionable weekly—the man who was always smiting the Goliahs of pretence and dishonesty with a pen that was sharper than any stone that ever David slung against the foe. He was such an amiable-looking man—had such a power of obliterating every token of intellectual force and fire from the calm surface of his countenance, that people, seeing him for the first time, were apt to stare at him in blank wonder at his innocent aspect. Was this the wielder of that scathing pen—was this the man who wrote not with ink but with aqua fortis? Even his placid matter-of-fact speech was, at first, a little disappointing. It was only by gentlest degrees that the iron hand of satire made itself felt under the velvet glove of conventional good manners. Leonard had met Mr. FitzJesse in London, at the clubs and elsewhere, and had felt that vague awe which the provincial feels for the embodied spirit of metropolitan intellect in the shape of a famous journalist. It was needful to be civil to such men, in order to be let down gently in their papers. One never knew when some rash unpremeditated act might furnish matter for a paragraph which would mean social annihilation.
There were other guests grouped about the fireplace—little Monty, the useful and good-humoured country-house hack; Colonel Blathwayt, of the Kildare Cavalry, a noted amateur actor, reciter, waltzer, spirit-rapper, invaluable in a house full of people—a tall, slim-waisted man, who rode nine stone, and at forty contrived to look seven-and-twenty; the Rev. St. Bernard Faddie, an Anglican curate, who carried Ritualism to the extremest limit consistent with the retention of his stipend as a minister of the Church of England, and who was always at loggerheads with some of his parishioners. There were Mr. and Mrs. St. Aubyn and their two daughters—county people, with loud voices, horsey, and doggy, and horticultural—always talking garden, when they were not talking stable or kennel. These were neighbours for whom Christabel had cared very little in the past. Leonard was considerably astonished at finding them domiciled at Mount Royal.
"And you had a nice passage," said his wife, smiling at her lord. "Will you have some tea?"
It seemed a curious kind of welcome to a husband after a year's absence; but Leonard answered feebly that he would take a cup of tea. One of the numerous tea-tables had been established in a corner near the fire, and Miss Bridgeman, in neat grey silk and linen collar, as of old, was officiating, with Mr. Faddie in attendance, to distribute the cups.
"No tea, thanks," said Jack Vandeleur, coming in with his sisters still entwined about him, still faintly suggestive of that poor man and the sea-serpents. "Would it be too dreadful if I were to suggest S. & B.?"
Jessie Bridgeman touched a spring bell on the tea-table, and gave the required order. There was a joviality, alaissez-allerin the air of the place, with which soda and brandy seemed quite in harmony. Everything in the house seemed changed to Leonard's eye; and yet the furniture, the armour, the family portraits, brown and indistinguishable in this doubtful light, were all the same. There were no flowers about in tubs or on tables. That subtle grace—as of a thoughtful woman's hand ruling and arranging everything, artistic even where seeming most careless—was missing. Papers, books were thrown anyhow upon the tables; whips, carriage-rugs, wraps, hats, encumbered the chairs near the door. Half-a-dozen dogs—pointers, setters, collie—sprawled or prowled about the room. In nowise did his house now resemble the orderly mansion which his mother had ruled so long, and which his wife had maintained upon exactly the same lines after her aunt's death. He had grumbled at what he called a silly observance of his mother's fads. The air of the house was now much more in accordance with his own view of life, and yet the change angered as much as it perplexed him.
"Where's the boy?" he asked, exploring the hall and its occupants, with a blank stare.
"In his nursery. Where should he be?" exclaimed Christabel, lightly.
"I thought he would have been with you. I thought he might have been here to bid me welcome home."
He had made a picture in his mind, almost involuntarily, of the mother and child—she, calm and lovely as one of Murillo's Madonnas, with the little one on her knee. There was no vein of poetry in his nature, yet unconsciously the memory of such pictures had associated itself with his wife's image. And instead of that holy embodiment of maternal love, there flashed and sparkled before him this brilliant woman, with fair fluffy hair, and Louis Quinze coat, all a glitter with cut-steel.
"Home!" echoed Christabel, mockingly; "how sentimental you have grown. I've no doubt the boy will be charmed to see you, especially if you have brought him some South American toys; but I thought it would bore you to see him before you had dined. He shall be on view in the drawing-room before dinner, if you would really like to see him so soon."
"Don't trouble," said Leonard, curtly; "I can find my way to the nursery."
He went upstairs without another word, leaving his friend Jack seated in the midst of the cheerful circle, drinking soda water and brandy, and talking of their adventures upon the backbone of South America.
"Delicious country!" said de Cazalet, who talked remarkably good English, with just the faintest Hibernian accent. "I have ridden over every inch of it. Ah, Mrs. Tregonell, that is the soil for poetry and adventure; a land of extinct volcanoes. If Byron had known the shores of the Amazon, he would have struck a deeper note of passion than any that was ever inspired by the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus. Sad that so grand a spirit should have pined in the prison-house of a worn-out world."
"I have always understood that Byron got some rather strong poetry out of Switzerland and Italy," murmured Mr. FitzJesse, meekly.
"Weak and thin to what he might have written had he known the Pampas," said the Baron.
"You have done the Pampas?" said Mr. FitzJesse.
"I have lived amongst wild horses, and wilder humanity, for months at a stretch."
"And you have published a volume of—verses?"
"Another of my youthful follies. But I do not place myself upon a level with Byron."
"I should if I were you," said Mr. FitzJesse. "It would be an original idea—and in an age marked by a total exhaustion of brain-power, an original idea is a pearl of price."
"What kind of dogs did you see in your travels?" asked Emily St. Aubyn, a well-grown upstanding young woman, in a severe tailor-gown of undyed homespun.
"Two or three very fine breeds of mongrels."
"I adore mongrels!" exclaimed Mopsy. "I think that kind of dog which belongs to no particular breed, which has been ill-used by London boys, and which follows one to one's doorstep, is the most faithful and intelligent of the whole canine race. Huxley may exalt Blenheim spaniels as the nearest thing to human nature; but my dog Tim, which is something between a lurcher, a collie, and a bull, is ever so much better than human nature."
"The Blenheim is greedy, luxurious, and lazy, and generally dies in middle life from the consequences of over-feeding," drawled Mr. FitzJesse. "I don't think Huxley is very far out."
"I would back a Cornish sheep-dog against any animal in creation," said Christabel, patting Randie, who was standing amiably on end, with his fore-paws on the cushioned elbow of her chair. "Do you know that these dogs smile when they are pleased, and cry when they are grieved—and they will mourn for a master with a fidelity unknown in humanity."
"Which as a rule does not mourn," said FitzJesse. "It only goes into mourning."
And so the talk went on, always running upon trivialities—glancing from theme to theme—a mere battledore and shuttlecock conversation—making a mock of most things and most people. Christabel joined in it all; and some of the bitterest speech that was spoken in that hour before the sounding of the seven o'clock gong, fell from her perfect lips.
"Did you ever see such a change in any one as in Mrs. Tregonell?" asked Dopsy of Mopsy, as they elbowed each other before the looking-glass, the first armed with a powder puff, the second with a little box containing the implements required for the production of piquant eyebrows.
"A wonderful improvement," answered Mopsy. "She's ever so much easier to get on with. I didn't think it was in her to be so thoroughlychic."
"Do you know, I really liked her better last year, when she was frumpy and dowdy," faltered Dopsy. "I wasn't able to get on with her, but I couldn't help looking up to her, and feeling that, after all, she was the right kind of woman. And now——"
"And now she condescends to be human—to be one of us—and the consequence is that her house is three times as nice as it was last year," said Mopsy, turning the corner of an eyebrow with a bold but careful hand, and sending a sharp elbow into Dopsy's face during the operation.
"I wish you'd be a little more careful," ejaculated Dopsy.
"I wish you'd contrive not to want the glass exactly when I do," retorted Mopsy.
"How do you like the French Baron?" asked Dopsy, when a brief silence had restored her equanimity.
"French, indeed! He is no more French than I am. Mr. FitzJesse told me that he was born and brought up in Jersey—that his father was an Irish Major on half-pay, and his mother a circus rider."
"But how does he come by his title—if it is a real title?"
"FitzJesse says the title is right enough. One of his father's ancestors came to the South of Ireland after the revocation of something—a treaty at Nancy—I think he said. He belonged to an old Huguenot family—those people who were massacred in the opera, don't you know—and the title had been allowed to go dead—till this man married a tremendously rich Sheffield cutler's daughter, and bought the old estate in Provence, and got himself enrolled in the French peerage. Romantic, isn't it?"
"Very. What became of the Sheffield cutler's daughter?"
"She drank herself to death two years after her marriage. FitzJesse says they both lived upon brandy, but she hadn't been educated up to it, and it killed her."
"A curious kind of man for Mrs. Tregonell to invite here. Not quite good style."
"Perhaps not—but he's very amusing."
Leonard spent half an hour with his son. The child had escaped from babyhood in the year that had gone. He was now a bright sentient creature, eager to express his thoughts—to gather knowledge—an active, vivacious being, full of health and energy. Whatever duties Christabel had neglected during her husband's absence, the boy had, at least, suffered no neglect. Never had childhood developed under happier conditions. The father could find no fault in the nursery, though there was a vague feeling in his mind that everything was wrong at Mount Royal.
"Why the deuce did she fill the house with people while I was away," he muttered to himself, in the solitude of his dressing-room, where his clothes had been put ready for him, and candles lighted by his Swiss valet. The dressing-room was at that end of the corridor most remote from Christabel's apartments. It communicated with the room Leonard had slept in during his boyhood—and that opened again into his gun-room.
The fact that these rooms had been prepared for him told him plainly enough that he and his wife were henceforth to lead divided lives. The event of last October, his year of absence, had built up a wall between them which he, for the time being at least, felt himself powerless to knock down.
"Can she suspect—can she know"—he asked himself, pausing in his dressing to stand staring at the fire, with moody brow and troubled eyes. "No, that's hardly possible. And yet her whole manner is changed. She holds me at a distance. Every look, every tone just now was a defiance. Of course I know that she loved that man—loved him first—last—always; never caring a straw for me. She was too careful of herself—had been brought up too well to go wrong, like other women—but she loved him. I would never have brought him inside these doors if I had not known that she could take care of herself. I tested and tried her to the uttermost—and—well—I took my change out of him."
Mr. Tregonell dressed himself a little more carefully than he was wont to dress—thinking for the most part that anything which suited him was good enough for his friends—and went down to the drawing-room, feeling like a visitor in a strange house, half inclined to wonder how he would be received by his wife and his wife's guests. He who had always ruled supreme in that house, choosing his visitors for his own pleasure—subjugating all tastes and habits of other people to his own convenience, now felt as if he were only there on sufferance.
It was early when he entered the drawing-room, and the Baron de Cazalet was the only occupant of that apartment. He was standing in a lounging attitude, with his back against the mantelpiece, and his handsome person set off by evening dress. That regulation costume does not afford much scope to the latent love of finery which still lurks in the civilized man, as if to prove his near relationship to the bead and feather-wearing savage—but de Cazalet had made himself as gorgeous as he could with jewelled studs, embroidered shirt, satin under-waistcoat, amber silk stockings, and Queen Ann shoes. He was assuredly handsome—but he had just that style of beauty which to the fastidious mind is more revolting than positive ugliness. Dark-brown eyes, strongly arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, a sensual mouth, a heavy jaw, a faultless complexion of the French plum-box order, large regular teeth of glittering whiteness, a small delicately trained moustache with waxed ends, and hair of oily sheen, odorous ofpommade divine, made up the catalogue of his charms. Leonard stood looking at him doubtfully, as if he were a hitherto unknown animal.
"Where did my wife pick him up, and why?" he asked himself. "I should have thought he was just the kind of man she would detest."
"How glad you must be to get back to your Lares and Penates," said the Baron, smiling blandly.
"I'm uncommonly glad to get back to my horses and dogs," answered Leonard, flinging himself into a large armchair by the fire, and taking up a newspaper. "Have you been long in the West?"
"About a fortnight, but I have been only three days at Mount Royal. I had the honour to renew my acquaintance with Mrs. Tregonell last August at Zermatt, and she was good enough to say that if I ever found myself in this part of the country she would be pleased to receive me in her house. I needn't tell you that with such a temptation in view I was very glad to bend my steps westward. I spent ten days on board a friend's yacht, between Dartmouth and the Lizard, landed at Penzance last Tuesday, and posted here, where I received a more than hospitable welcome."
"You are a great traveller, I understand?"
"I doubt if I have done as much as you have in that way. I have seldom travelled for the sake of travelling. I have lived in the tents of the Arabs. I have bivouacked on the Pampas—and enjoyed life in all the cities of the South, from Valparaiso to Carthagena; but I can boast no mountaineering exploits or scientific discoveries—and I never read a paper at the Geographical."
"You look a little too fond of yourself for mountaineering," said Leonard, smiling grimly at the Baron's portly figure, and all-pervading sleekness.
"Well—yes—I like a wild life—but I have no relish for absolute hardship—the thermometer below zero, a doubtful supply of provisions, pemmican, roasted skunk for supper, without any currant jelly—no, I love mine ease at mine Inn."
He threw out his fine expanse of padded chest and shoulders, and surveyed the spacious lamp-lit room with an approving smile. This no doubt was the kind of Inn at which he loved to take his ease—a house full of silly women, ready to be subjugated by his florid good looks and shallow accomplishments.
The ladies now came straggling in—first Emily St. Aubyn, and then Dopsy, whose attempts at conversation were coldly received by the county maiden. Dopsy's and Mopsy's home-made gowns, cheap laces and frillings, and easy flippancy were not agreeable to the St. Aubyn sisters. It was not that the St. Aubyn manners, which always savoured of the stable and farmyard, were more refined or elegant; but the St. Aubyns arrogated to themselves the right to be vulgar, and resented free-and-easy manners in two young persons who were obviously poor and obviously obscure as to their surroundings. If their gowns had been made by a West End tailor, and they had been able to boast of intimate acquaintance with a duchess and two or three countesses, their flippancy might have been tolerable, nay, even amusing, to the two Miss St. Aubyns; but girls who went nowhere and knew nobody, had no right to attempt smartness of speech, and deserved to be sat upon.
To Dopsy succeeded Mopsy, then some men, then Mrs. St. Aubyn and her younger daughter Clara, then Mrs. Tregonell, in a red gown draped with old Spanish lace, and with diamond stars in her hair, a style curiously different from those quiet dinner dresses she had been wont to wear a year ago. Leonard looked at her in blank amazement—just as he had looked at their first meeting. She, who had been like the violet sheltering itself among its leaves, now obviously dressed for effect, and as obviously courted admiration.
The dinner was cheerful to riotousness. Everybody had something to say; anecdotes were told, and laughter was frequent and loud. The St. Aubyn girls, who had deliberately snubbed the sisters Vandeleur, were not above conversing with the brother, and, finding him a kindred spirit in horseyness and doggyness, took him at once into their confidence, and were on the friendliest terms before dinner was finished. De Cazalet sat next his hostess, and talked exclusively to her. Mr. FitzJesse had Miss Bridgeman on his left hand, and conversed with her in gentle murmurs, save when in his quiet voice, and with his seeming-innocent smile, he told some irresistibly funny story—some touch of character seen with a philosophic eye—for the general joy of the whole table. Very different was the banquet of to-day from that quiet dinner on the first night of Mr. Hamleigh's visit to Mount Royal, that dinner at which Leonard watched his wife so intensely, eager to discover to what degree she was affected by the presence of her first lover. He watched her to-night, at the head of her brilliantly lighted dinner-table—no longer the old subdued light of low shaded lamps, but the radiance of innumerable candles in lofty silver candelabra, shining over a striking decoration of vivid crimson asters and spreading palm-leaves—he watched her helplessly, hopelessly, knowing that he and she were ever so much farther apart than they had been in the days before he brought Angus Hamleigh to Mount Royal, those miserable discontented days when he had fretted himself into a fever of jealousy and vague suspicion, and had thought to find a cure by bringing the man he feared and hated into his home, so that he might know for certain how deep the wrong was which this man's very existence seemed to inflict upon him. To bring those two who had loved and parted face to face, to watch and listen, to fathom the thoughts of each—that had been the process natural and congenial to his jealous temper; but the result had been an uncomfortable one. And now he saw his wife, whose heart he had tried to break—hating her because he had failed to make her love him—just as remote and unapproachable as of old.
"What a fool I was to marry her," he thought, after replying somewhat at random to Mrs. St. Aubyn's last remark upon the superiority of Dorkings to Spaniards from a culinary point of view. "It was my determination to have my own way that wrecked me. I couldn't submit to be conquered by a girl—to have the wife I had set my heart upon when I was a boy, stolen from me by the first effeminate fopling my silly mother invited to Mount Royal. I had never imagined myself with any other woman for my wife—never really cared for any other woman."
This was the bent of Mr. Tregonell's reflections as he sat in his place at that animated assembly, adding nothing to its mirth, or even to its noise; albeit in the past his voice had ever been loudest, his laugh most resonant. He felt more at his ease after dinner, when the women had left—the brilliant de Cazalet slipping away soon after them, although not until he had finished his host's La Rose—and when Mr. St. Aubyn expanded himself in county talk, enlightening the wanderer as to the progress of events during his absence—while Mr. FitzJesse sat blandly puffing his cigarette, a silent observer of the speech and gestures of the county magnate, speculating, from a scientific point of view, as to how much of this talk were purely automatic—an inane drivel which would go on just the same if half the Squire's brain had been scooped out. Jack Vandeleur smoked and drank brandy and water, while little Monty discoursed to him, in confidential tones, upon the racing year which was now expiring at Newmarket—the men who had made pots of money, and the men who had been beggared for life. There seemed to be no medium between those extremes.
When the host rose, Captain Vandeleur was for an immediate adjournment to billiards, but to his surprise, Leonard walked off to the drawing-room.
"Aren't you coming?" asked Jack, dejectedly.
"Not to-night. I have been too long away from feminine society not to appreciate the novelty of an evening with ladies. You and Monty can have the table to yourselves, unless Mr. FitzJesse——"
"I never play," replied the gentle journalist; "but I rather like sitting in a billiard-room and listening to the conversation of the players. It is always so full of ideas."
Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu went their way, and the other men repaired to the drawing-room, whence came the sound of the piano, and the music of a rich baritone, trolling out a popular air from the most fashionable opera-bouffe—that one piece which all Paris was bent upon hearing at the same moment, whereby seats in the little boulevard theatre were selling at a ridiculous premium.
De Cazalet was singing to Mrs. Tregonell's accompaniment—apatoissong, with a refrain which would have been distinctly indecent, if the tails of all the words had not been clipped off, so as to reduce the language to mild idiocy.
"The kind of song one could fancy being fashionable in the decline of the Roman Empire," said FitzJesse, "when Apuleius was writing his 'Golden Ass,' don't you know."
After the song came a duet from "Traviata," in which Christabel sang with a dramatic power which Leonard never remembered to have heard from her before. The two voices harmonized admirably, and there were warm expressions of delight from the listeners.
"Very accomplished man, de Cazalet," said Colonel Blathwayt; "uncommonly useful in a country house—sings, and plays, and recites, and acts—rather puffy and short-winded in his elocution—if he were a horse one would call him a roarer—but always ready to amuse. Quite an acquisition."
"Who is he?" asked Leonard, looking glum. "My wife picked him up in Switzerland, I hear—that is to say, he seems to have made himself agreeable—or useful—to Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman; and, in a moment of ill-advised hospitality, my wife asked him here. Is he received anywhere? Does anybody know anything about him?"
"He is received in a few houses—rich houses where the hostess goes in for amateur acting andtableaux vivants, don't you know; and people know a good deal about him—nothing actually to his detriment. The man was a full-blown adventurer when he had the good luck to get hold of a rich wife. He pays his way now, I believe; but the air of the adventurer hangs round him still. A man of Irish parentage—brought up in Jersey. What can you expect of him?"
"Does he drink?"
"Like a fish—but his capacity to drink is only to be estimated by cubic space—the amount he can hold. His brain and constitution have been educated up to alcohol. Nothing can touch him further."
"Colonel Blathwayt, we want you to give us the 'Wonderful One-Horse Shay,' and after that, the Baron is going to recite 'James Lee's Wife,' said Mrs. Tregonell, while her guests ranged themselves into an irregular semicircle, and the useful Miss Bridgeman placed aprie-dieuchair in a commanding position for the reciter to lean upon gracefully, or hug convulsively in the more energetic passages of his recitation.
"Everybody seems to have gone mad," thought Mr. Tregonell, as he seated himself and surveyed the assembly, all intent and expectant.
His wife sat near the piano with de Cazalet bending over her, talking in just that slightly lowered voice which gives an idea of confidential relations, yet may mean no more than a vain man's desire to appear the accepted worshipper of a beautiful woman. Never had Leonard seen Angus Hamleigh's manner so distinctively attentive as was the air of this Hibernian adventurer.
"Just the last man whose attentions I should have supposed she would tolerate," thought Leonard; "but any garbage is food for a woman's vanity."
The "Wonderful One-Horse Shay" was received with laughter and delight. Dopsy and Mopsy were in raptures. "How could a horrid American have written anything so clever? But then it was Colonel Blathwayt's inimitable elocution which gave a charm to the whole thing. The poem was poor enough, no doubt, if one read it to oneself. Colonel Blathwayt was adorably funny."
"It's a tremendous joke, as you do it," said Mopsy, twirling her sunflower fan—a great yellow flower, like the sign of the Sun Inn, on a black satin ground. "How delightful to be so gifted."
"Now for 'James Lee's Wife,'" said the Colonel, who accepted the damsel's compliments for what they were worth. "You'll have to be very attentive if you want to find out what the poem means; for the Baron's delivery is a trifle spasmodic."
And now de Cazalet stepped forward with a vellum-bound volume in his hand, dashed back his long sleek hair with a large white hand, glanced at the page, coughed faintly, and then began in thick, hurried accents, which kept getting thicker and more hurried as the poem advanced. It was given, not in lines, but in spasms, panted out, till at the close the Baron sank exhausted, breathless, like the hunted deer when the hounds close round him.
"Beautiful! exquisite! too pathetic!" exclaimed a chorus of feminine voices.
"I only wish the Browning Society could hear that: they would be delighted," said Mr. Faddie, who piqued himself upon being in the literary world.
"It makes Browning so much easier to understand," remarked Mr. FitzJesse, with his habitual placidity.