I /ks*\ 
 
 

 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 

 
 MOUNT ROYAL 
 
 iff 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 "LADY AUDLEY'S SECEET," "VIXEN," 
 ♦•J.SEIMAEL." ETC. ETC. ETC 
 
 Stcrtotgprtr lEtritfon 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 SPENCER BLACKETT 
 (Successor to 3. & ft. fHarfncII) 
 
 MILTON HOUSE, ST. BRIDE STREET 
 
 /Ml 
 
 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET, E.G. 
 [All rights reserved]
 
 
 OHBAP UNIFORM EDITION OF MIS8 BRADDON'P NOTEL6. 
 
 Price 2s. picture boards ; 2s. 6d. cloth gilt ' 3s. 6d. W/ 
 parchment or half morocco ; posta<- '■> 4d. 
 
 MISS BRADDON'S NOVELS 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 "Lady Audley's Secret, " "Vixen," " Ishmael," etc. 
 
 " No one can be dull who has a novel by Miss Braddon in hand. 
 The most tiresome journey is beguiled, and the most wearisome 
 illness is brightened, by any one of her books." 
 
 "Miss Braddon is tht Queeo of tbe circulating libraries." — 
 Tht World. 
 
 N.B. — There are now 47 Novels always in print; For 
 full list see back of cover, or apply for a Catalogue, to be 
 sent (post free). 
 
 London; SPENCER BLACKETT 
 
 (Successor to 3. & ft. Jflaifodl) 
 
 Milton House, St. Bride Street. E.C. 
 And at all Railway Bookstalls, Booksellers' and Libraries.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 our. TAW 
 
 L The Days that are No More .... 5 
 
 ii. But then came One the Lovelace of his Day 18 
 
 in. "Tintagel, Half in Sea, and Half on 
 
 Land" 32 
 
 iv. ' Love ! Thou art Leading Me from Wintry 
 
 Cold ' ' 45 
 
 v. 'The Silver Answer Rang, — "Not Death 
 
 but Love"' 65 
 
 vi. In Society .61 
 
 vn. Cupid and Psyche 83 
 
 viii. Le Secret de Polichinelle .... 94 
 
 ix. 'Love is Love for Evermore' .... 113 
 
 x. ' Let Me and My Passionate Love go by' . 122 
 
 xi. 'Alas for Me then, My Good Days are " 
 
 Done' 128 
 
 xu. 'Grief a Fixed Star, and Joy a Vane that 
 
 Veers' 131 
 
 Kin. ' t jOve will have His Day' .... 140 
 
 xiv. '3ut Here is One who Loves You as of 
 
 Old' 155 
 
 xv. ' TnAT Lip and Voice are Mute for Ever ' . 166 
 
 xvi. 'Not the Gods can Shake the Past' . . 172 
 
 xvii. 'I have put My Days and Dreams out of 
 
 Mind' 18C
 
 iv Contents. 
 
 CHI*. PAG1 
 
 xviii. 'And Pale from TnE Past we Draw Nigh 
 
 Thee' 185 
 
 xix. ' But it Sufficeth, that the Day will End ' 201 
 
 xx. ' Who Knows Not Circe V . . . . 216 
 
 xxi. 'And Time is Setting Wi 1 Me, O' . .229 
 
 xxii. 'With such Remorseless Speed Still Come 
 
 New Woes' 231 
 
 xxm. 'Yours on Monday, God's to-day' . . 243 
 
 xxiv. Duel or Murder? 250 
 
 xxv. 'Dust to Dust' ....... 255 
 
 xxvi. 'Pain for Thy Girdle, and Sorrow upon 
 
 Thy Head' 265 
 
 xxvii. 'I Will have no Mercy on Him' . . 269 
 
 xxviii. ' Gai Donc, la Voyageuse, au Coup du 
 
 Pelerin ! ' 283 
 
 xxix. 'Time Turns the Old Days to Dertsion' . 288 
 
 xxx. ' Thou shouldst come lik^e a Fury Crowned 
 
 with Snakes' 299 
 
 xxxi. ' His Lady Smiles ; Delight is in Her 
 
 Pace' 305 
 
 xxxii. ' Love bore such Bitter and such Deadly 
 
 Fruit' 318 
 
 xxxiii. 'She Stood up in Bitter Case, with a 
 
 Pale yet Steady Face' .... 330 
 
 xxxiv. We have Djne with Tears and Treasons . 346
 
 MOUNT EOYAL. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE. 
 
 ' And he was a widower,' said Christabel. 
 
 She was listening to an oft-told tale, kneeling in the firelight, 
 at her aunt's knee, the ruddy glow tenderly touching her fair soft 
 hair and fairer forehead, her big blue eyes lifted lovingly to Mrs. 
 Tregonell's face. 
 
 ' And he was a widower, Aunt Diana,' she repeated, with an 
 expression of distaste, as if something had set her teeth on edge. 
 ' I cannot help wondering that you coidd care for a widower — a 
 man who had begun life by caring for somebody else.' 
 
 ' Do you suppose any one desperately in love ever thinks of 
 the past ] ' asked another voice out of the twilight. ' Those in- 
 fatuated creatures called lovers are too happy and contented with 
 the rapture of the present.' 
 
 ' One would think you had tremendous experience, Jessie, by 
 the way you lay down the law,' said Christabel, laughing. ' But 
 I want to know what Auntie has to say about falliug in love with 
 a widower.' 
 
 ' If you had ever seen him and known him, I don't think you 
 would wonder at my liking him,' answered Mrs. Tregonell, lying 
 back in her armchair, and talking of the story of her life in a 
 placid way, as if it were the plot of a novel, so thoroughly does 
 time smooth the rough edge of grief. ' When he came to my 
 father's house, his young wife had been dead just two years — she 
 died three days after the birth of her first child — and Captain 
 Hamleigh was very sad and grave, and seemed to take very little 
 pleasure in life. It was in the shooting season, aad the other 
 men were out upon the hills all day.' 
 
 ' Murdering innocent birds,' interjected Christabel. ' How I 
 hate them for it ! ' 
 
 'Captain Hamleigh hung about the house, not seeming to 
 know very well what to do with himself, so your mother
 
 6 Mount Royal. 
 
 and I took pity upon him, and tried to amuse him, which 
 effort resulted in his amusing us, for he was ever so much 
 cleverer than we were. He was so kind and sympathetic. 
 "We had just founded a Dorcas Society, and we were muddling 
 hopelessly in an endeavour to make good sensible rules, so that 
 we should do nothing to lessen the independent feeling of our 
 people — and he came to our rescue, and took the whole thing in 
 hand, and seemed to understand it all as thoroughly as if he had 
 been establishing Dorcas Societies all his life. My father said it 
 was because the Captain had been sixth wrangler, and that it 
 was the higher mathematics which made him so clever at making 
 rules. But Ciara and I said it was his kind heart that made him 
 so quick at understanding how to help the poor without humiliat- 
 ing them.' 
 
 'It was very nice of him,' said (Jhristabel, who had heard the 
 story a hundred times before, but who was never weary of it, 
 and had a special reason for being interested this afternoon. 
 ' And so he stayed a long time at my grandfather's, and you fell 
 in love with him ? ' 
 
 'I began by being sorry for him,' replied Mrs. Tregonell. 
 ' He told us all about his young wife — how happy they had been 
 — how their one year of wedded life seemed to him like a lovely 
 dream. They had only been engaged three months ; he had 
 known her less than a year and a half altogether ; had come 
 home from India ; had seen her at a friend's house, fallen in love 
 with her, married her, and lost her within those eighteen months. 
 ' Everything smiled upon us,' he said. ' I ought to have 
 remembered Polycrates and his ring.' 
 
 'He must have been rather a doleful person,' said Christ abel, 
 who had all the exacting ideas of early youth in relation to love 
 and lovers. ' A widower of that kind ought to perform suttee, 
 and make an end of the business, rather than go about the world 
 prosing to nice girls. I wonder more and more that you could 
 have cared for him.' And then, seeing her aunt's eyes shining 
 with unshed tears, the girl laid her sunny head upon the matronly 
 shoulder, and murmured tenderly, ' Forgive me for teasing you, 
 dear, I am only pretending. I love to hear about Captain Hara- 
 leigh ; and I am not very much surprised that you ended by 
 loving him — or that he soon forgot his brief dream of bliss with 
 the other young lady, and fell desperately in love with you.' 
 
 ' It was not till after Christinas that we were engaged,' con- 
 tinued Mrs. Tregonell, looking dreamily at the fire. ' My fathei 
 was delighted — so was my sister Clara — your dear mother. 
 Everything went pleasantly ; our lives seemed all sunshine. I 
 ought to have remembered Polycrates, for I knew Schiller's 
 ballad about him by heart. But I could think of nothing beyond 
 that perfect all- sufficing happiness. We were not to be married
 
 The Days that are No More. 7 
 
 till late in the autumn, when it would be three years since his 
 wife's death. It was my father's wisn that I should not be 
 iian-ied till after my nineteenth birthday, which would not be 
 till September. I was so happy in my engagement, so confident 
 in my lover's fidelity, that I was more than content to wait. 
 So all that spring he stayed at Penlee. Our mild climate had 
 improved his health, which was not at all good when he came to 
 as — indeed he had retired from the service before his marriage, 
 chiefly on account of weak health. But he spoke so lightly and 
 confidently about himself in this matter, that it had never 
 entered into my head to feel any serious alarm about him, till 
 „-arly in May, when he and Clara and I were caught in a drench- 
 ing rainstorm during a mountaineering expedition on Rough Tor, 
 and then had to walk four or five miles in the rain before we 
 came to the inn where the carriage was to wait for us. Clara and 
 I, who were always about in all weathers, were very little 
 worse for the wet walk and the long drive home in damp clothes. 
 But George was seriously ill for three weeks with cough and low 
 fever ; and it was at this time that our family doctor told my 
 father that he would not give much for his future son-in-law's 
 life. There was a marked tendency to lung complaint, he said ; 
 Captain Hamleigh had confessed that several members of his 
 family had died of consumption. My father told me this — urged 
 me to avoid a marriage which must end in misery to me, and was 
 deeply grieved when I declared that no such consideration would 
 induce me to break my engagement, and to grieve the man I 
 loved. If it were needful that our marriage should be delayed, I 
 was contented to submit to any delay ; but nothing could loosen 
 the tie between me and my dear love.' 
 
 Aunt and niece were both crying now. However familiar the 
 story might he, they always wept a little at this point. 
 
 ' George never knew one word of this conversation between 
 my father and me — he never suspected our fears — but from that 
 horn- my happiness was gone. My life was one perpetual dread 
 — one ceaseless strugle to hide all anxieties and fears under a 
 smile. George rallied, and seemed to grow strong again— was 
 full of energy and high spirits, and I had to pretend to think him 
 as thoroughly recovered as he fancied himself. But by this time 
 I had grown sadly wise. I had questioned our doctor — had 
 looked into medical books — and I knew every sad sign and token 
 of decay. I knew what the flushed cheek and the brilliant eye, 
 the damp cold hand, and the short cough meant I knew that 
 the hand of death was on him whom I loved more than all the 
 world besides. There was no need for the postponement of our 
 marriage. In the long bright days of August he seemed won- 
 derfully well — as well as he had been before the attack in May. 
 I was almost happy ; for, in spite of what the •doctor "had told
 
 8 Mount Boy at. 
 
 me, I begun to hope ! but early in September, while the dres* 
 makers were in the house making my wedding clothes, the end 
 came suddenly, unexpectedly, with only a few hours' warning. 
 Oh, Cbristabei ! I cannot speak of that day !' 
 
 1 No, darling, you shall not, you must not,' cried Christabel, 
 showering kisses on her aunt's pale cheek. 
 
 ' And yet you always lead her on to talk about Captain Hani- 
 leigh,' said the sensible voice out of the shadow. ' Isn't that just 
 a little inconsistent of our sweet Belle V 
 
 ' Don't call me your ' sweet Belle' — as if I were a baby,' ex- 
 claimed the girl. ' I know I am inconsistent — I was born 
 foolish, and no one has ever taken the trouble to cure me of my 
 folly. And now, Auntie dear, tell me about Captain Hamleigh's 
 son — the boy who is coming here to-moiTOW.' 
 
 ' I have not seen him since he was at Eton. The Squire 
 drove me down on a Fourth of June to see him.' 
 
 1 It was very good of Uncle Tregonell.' 
 
 ' The Squire was always good,' replied Mrs. Tregonell, with a 
 dignified air. Christabel's only remembrance of her uncle was of 
 a large loud man, who blustered and scolded a good deal, and 
 frequently contrived, perhaps, without meaning it, to make 
 everybody in the house uncomfortable ; so she reflected inwardly 
 upon that blessed dispensation which, however poorly wives may 
 think of living husbands, provides that every widow should 
 consider her departed spouse completely admirable. 
 
 ' And was he a nice a boy in those days 1 ' asked Christabel, 
 keenly interested. 
 
 ' He was a handsome gentleman-like lad — very intellectual 
 looking ; but I was grieved to see that he looked delicate, like 
 his father ; and his dame told me that he generally had a winter 
 cough.' 
 
 ' Who took care of him in those days 1 ' 
 
 ' His maternal aunt — a baronet's wife, with a handsome house 
 in Eaton Square. All his mother's people were well placed in 
 life.' 
 
 ' Poor boy ! hard to have neither father nor mother. It was 
 twelve years ago when you spent that season in London with the 
 Squire,' said Christabel, calculating profoundly with the aid of 
 her finger tips ; and Angus Hamleigh was then sixteen, which 
 makes him now eight-and-twenty — dreadfully old. And since 
 then he has been at Oxford — and he got the Newdigate — what is 
 the Newdigate ? — and he did not hunt, or drive tandem, or have 
 rats in his rooms, or paint the doors vermillion — like — like the 
 general run of young men,' said Christabel, reddening, and hurry- 
 ing on confusedly ; ' and he was altogether rather a superior sort 
 of person at the university.' 
 
 He had not your cousin Leonard's high spirits and powerful
 
 The Days that arc No More. 9 
 
 physique,' said Mrs, Tregonell, as if she were ever so slightly 
 offended, ' Young men's tastes are so different.' 
 
 1 Yes,' Bighed Christabel, ' if s lucky they are, is it not 1 It 
 wouldn't do for them all to keep rats in their rooms, would it 1 
 The poor old colleges would smell so dreadful. Well,' with 
 another sigh, ' it is just three weeks since Angus Hamleigh 
 accepted your invitation to come here to stay, and I have been 
 expiring of curiosity ever since. If he keeps me expiring much 
 longer I shall be dead before he comes. And I have a dreadful 
 foreboding that, when he does appear, I shall detest him.' 
 
 ' No fear of that/ said Miss Bridgeman, the owner of the 
 voice that issued now and again from the covert of a deep arm- 
 chair on the other side of the fireplace. 
 
 ' Why not, Mistress Oracle 1 ' asked Christabel. 
 
 'Because, as Mr. Hamleigh is accomplished and good-looking, 
 and as you see very few young men of any kind, and none that 
 are particularly attractive, the odds are fifty to one that you will 
 fall in love with him.' 
 
 ' I ara not that kind of person,' protested Christabel, drawing 
 up her long full throat, a perfect throat, and one of the girl's 
 chief beauties. 
 
 ' I hope not,' said Mrs. Tregonell ; ' I trust that Belle has 
 better sense than to fall in love with a young man, just because 
 he happens to come to stay in the bouse.' 
 
 Christabel was on the point of exclaiming, ' Why, Auntie, you 
 did it ;' but caught herself up sharply, and cried out instead, with 
 an air of settling the question for ever, 
 
 ' My dear Jessie, he is eight-and-twenty. Just ten years 
 older than I am/ 
 
 ' Of course — he's ever so much too old for her. A blase man 
 of the world,' said Mrs. Tregonell. ' I should be deeply sorry to 
 see my darling marry a man of that age — and with such ante- 
 cedents. I should like her to marry a young man not above two 
 or three years her senior.' 
 
 ' And fond of rats,' said Jessie Bridgeman to herself, for she 
 had a shrewd idea that she knew the young man whose image 
 lilled Mrs. Tregonell's mind as she spoke. 
 
 All these words were spoken in a goodly oak panelled room in 
 the Manor House known as Mount Royal, on the slope of a bo ky 
 hill about a mile and a half from the little town of Boscastle, • i 
 the north c ast of Cornwall. It was an easy matter, according to 
 the Herald's Office, to show that Mount Royal had belong' 1 i 
 the Trcgonells in the days of the Norman kings; for I lie 
 Tregonells traced their descent, by a female branch, from the 
 ancient baronial family of Botterell or Bottereaux, who oik-j 
 held a kind of Court in their castle on Mount Royal, had their 
 dungeons and their prisoners, and, in the words of Carew,
 
 10 Mount Boyal. 
 
 'exercised some large jurisdiction.' Of the ancient castle hardly 
 A stone remained ; but the house in which Mrs. Tregonell 
 lived was as old as the reign of James the First, and had all 
 the rich and quaint beauty of that delightful period in 
 architecture. Nor was there any prettier room at Mount 
 Royal than this spacious oak-panelled parlour, with curious 
 nooks and cupboards, a recessed fireplace, or 'cosy-corner,' 
 with a small window on each side of the chimney-breast, 
 and one particular alcove placed at an angle of the house, 
 overlooking one of the most glorious views in England. It 
 might be hyperbore perhaps to call those Cornish hills mountains,, 
 yet assuredly it was a mountain landscape over which the eye 
 roved as it looked from the windows of Mount Royal ; for those 
 wide sweeps oi hill side, those deep clefts and gorges, and 
 heathery slopes, ca which the dark red cattle grazed in silent 
 peacefulness, an<2 the rocky bed of the narrow river that went 
 rushing through the deep valley, had all the grandeur of the 
 Scottish Highlands, all the pastoral beauty of Switzer- 
 land. And }i vay to the right, beyond the wild and 
 indented coast- ji.ue, that horned coast which is said to have 
 given its name to Cornwall — Cornu-Wales — stretchecV the Atlantic. 
 
 The room had that quaint charm peculiar to rooms occupied by 
 many generations, and ujion which each age as it went by has left 
 its mark. It was a room full of anachronisms. There was some of 
 the good old Jacobean furniture left in it, while spindle-legged 
 Chippendale tables and luxurious nineteenth- century chairs and 
 sofas agreeably contrasted with those heavy oak cabinets and 
 corner cupboards. Here an old Indian screen or a china monster 
 suggested a fashionable auction room, filled with ladies who wore 
 patches and played ombre, and squabbled for ideal ugliness in 
 Oriental pottery ; there a delicately carved cherry-wood prk-Jii /.:, 
 with claw feet, recalled the earlier beauties of the Stuart CJourt. 
 Time had faded the stamped velvet curtains to that neutral 
 withered -leaf hue which painters love in a background, and 
 against which bright yellow chrysanthemums and white asters in 
 dark red and blue Japanese bowls, seen dimly in the fitful fire- 
 glow, made patches of light and colour. 
 
 The girl kneeling by the matron's chair, looked dreamily into 
 the fire, was even fairer than her surroundings. She was 
 thoroughly English in her beauty, features not altogether perfect, 
 but complexion of that dazzling fairness and wild-iose bloom 
 which is in itself enough for loveliness ; a complexion so delicate 
 as to betray every feeling of the sensitive mind, and to vary with 
 every shade of emotion. Her eyes were blue, clear as summer 
 skies, and with an expression of childlike innocence — that look 
 which tells of a soul whose purity has never been tarnished by 
 the knowledge of evil. That frank clear outlook was natural in
 
 TJie Days that are No More. 11 
 
 a girl brought up as Christabel Courtenay had been at a. good 
 woman's knee, shut in and sheltered from the rough world, reared 
 in the love and fear of God, shaping every thought of her life by 
 the teaching of the Gospel. 
 
 She had been an orphan at nine years old, and had parted for 
 ever from mother and father before her. fifth birthday, Mrs. 
 Courtenay leaving her only child in her sister's care, and going 
 out to India to join her husband, one of the Sudder Judges. 
 Husband and wife died of cholera in the fourth year of 
 Mrs. Courtenay's residence at Calcutta, leaving Christabel in her 
 aunt's care. 
 
 Mr. Courtenay was a man of ample means, and his wife, 
 daughter and co-heiress with Mrs. Tregonell of Ealph Champer- 
 nowne, had a handsome dowry, so Christabel might fairly rank 
 as an heiress. On her grandfather's death she inherited half of 
 the Champernowne estate, which was not entailed. But she had 
 hardly ever given a thought to her financial position. She knew 
 that she was a ward in Chancery, and that Mrs. Tregonell was 
 her guardian and adopted mother, that she had always as much 
 money as she wars ted, and never experienced the pain of seeing 
 poverty which she coidd not relieve in some measure from her 
 well-supplied purse. The general opinion in the neighbourhood of 
 Mount Koyal was that the Indian Judge had accumulated an 
 immense fortune during his twenty years' labour as a civil 
 servant ; but this notion was founded rather upon vague ideas 
 about Warren Hastings and the Padoga tree, and the supposed 
 inability of any Indian official to refuse a bribe, than on plain facta 
 or personal knowledge. 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell had been left a widow at thirty-live years of 
 age, a widow with one son, whom she idolized, but who was 
 not a source of peace and happiness. He was open-handed, had 
 no petty vices, and was supposed to possess a noble heart — a fact 
 which Christabel was sometimes inclined to doubt when she saw 
 his delight in the slaughter of birds and beasts, not having in 
 her own nature that sportsman's instinct which can excuse such 
 murder. He was not the kind of lad who would wilfully set his 
 foot upon a worm, but he had no thrill of tenderness or re- 
 morseful pity as he looked at the glazing eye, or felt against his 
 hand the last feeble heart-beats of snipe or woodcock. He was 
 a troublesome boy — fond of inferior company, and loving rather 
 to be first fiddle in the saddle-room than to mind his manners in 
 his mother's pink-and-white panelled saloon— among the best 
 people in the neighbourhood. He was lavish to recklessness in 
 the use of money, and therefore was always furnished with fol- 
 lowers and flatterers. His University career had been altogether 
 a failure and a disgrace. He had taken no degree — had icade 
 himself notorious for those rough pranks which have not even
 
 .12 Mount Royal. 
 
 the merit of being original — the traditionary college misde- 
 meanours handed down From generation to generation of under- 
 graduates, and which by their blatant folly incline the outside 
 world to vote for the suppression of Universities and the extinc- 
 tion of the undergraduate race. 
 
 His mother had known and suffered all this, yet still loved 
 her boy with a fond excusing love — ever ready to pardon— ever 
 eager to believe that these faults and follies were but the crop of 
 wild oats which must needs precede the ripe and rich harvest of 
 manhood. Such wild youths, she told herself, fatuously, gene- 
 rally make the best men. Leonard would mend his ways before 
 he was five-and-twenty, and would become interested in his 
 estate, and develop into a model Squire, like his admirable 
 father. 
 
 That he had no love for scholarship mattered little — a 
 country gentleman, with half a dozen manors to look after, could 
 be but little advantaged by a familiar acquaintance with the 
 integral calculus, or a nice appreciation of the Greek tragedians. 
 "When Leonard Tregonell and the college Dons were mutually 
 disgusted with each other to a point that made any further 
 residence at Oxford impossible, the young man graciously an- 
 nounced his intention of making a tour round the world, for 
 the benefit of his health, somewhat impaired by University 
 dissipations, and the widening of his experience in the agricul- 
 tural line. 
 
 ' Farming has been reduced to a science,' he told his mother ; 
 ' I want to see how it works in our colonies. I mean to make a 
 good many reformations in the management of my farms and 
 the conduct of my tenants when I come home.' 
 
 At first loth to part with him, very fearful of letting him 
 so far out of her ken, Mrs. Tregonell ultimately allowed herself to 
 be persuaded that sea voyages and knocking about in strange 
 lands would be the making of her sen ; and there was no sacri- 
 fice, no loss of comfort and delight, which she would not have 
 endured for his benefit. She spent many sad hours in prayer, 
 or on her knees before her open Bible ; and at last it seemed to 
 her that her friends and neighbours must be right, and that it 
 would be for Leonard's good to go. If he stayed in England, she 
 could not hope to keep him always in Cornwall He could go to 
 London, and, no doubt, London vices would be worse than Oxford 
 vices. Yes, it was good for him to go ; she thought of Esau, 
 and how, after a foolish and ill-governed youth, the son, who had 
 bartered his father's blessing, yet became an estimable member 
 of society. Why should not her boy flourish as Esau had 
 flourished 1 but nev«.r wil hout the parental blessing. That would 
 be his to the end. He .-■•aid not sin beyond her large capacity 
 for pardon : he could ;;= t exhaust an inexhaustible love. So
 
 The Days that are No More. 13 
 
 Leonard, who had suddenly found that wild Cornish const, and 
 even the long rollers of the Atlantic contemptibly insignificant 
 as compared with the imagined magnitude of Australian downs, 
 and the grandeurs of Botany Bay, hurried on the preparations 
 for his departure, provided himself with everything expensive in 
 gunnery, fishing-tackle, porpoise-hide thigh-boots, and waterproof 
 gear of every kind, and departed rejoicing in the most admirably 
 appointed Australian steamer. The family doctor, who was one 
 of the many friends in favour of this tour, had strongly recom- 
 mended the rough-and-tumble life of a sailing-vessel ; but 
 Leonard pveferred the luxury and swiftness of a steamer, and, 
 suggesting to his mother that a sailing-vessel always took out 
 emigrants, from whom it was more than likely he would catch 
 scarlet fever or small-pox, instantly brought Mrs. Trcgonell to 
 perceive that a steamer which carried no second-class passengers 
 was the only fitting conveyance for her son. 
 
 He was gone — and, while the widow grieved in submissive 
 silence, telling herself that it was God's will that she and her son 
 should be parted, and that whatever was good for him should be 
 well for her, Christ abel and the rest of the household inwardly 
 rejoiced at his absence. Nobody openly owned to being happier 
 without him ; but the knowledge that he was far away brought 
 a sense of relief to every one ; even to the old servants, who had 
 been so fond of him in his childhood, when the kitchen and ser- 
 vants' hall had ever been a happy hunting-ground for him in 
 periods of banishment from the drawing-room. 
 
 ' It is no good for me to punish him,' Mrs. Tregonell had 
 remonstrated, with assumed displeasure ; ' you all make so 
 much of him.' 
 
 'Oh, ma'am, he is such a fine, high-spirited boy,' the cook 
 would reply on these occasions ; ' 'tesn't possible to be angry 
 with him. He has such a spirit.' 
 
 ' Such a spirit ' was only a euphuism for such a temper ; 
 and, as years went on, Mr. Tregonell's visits to the kitchen and 
 servants' hall came to be less apjjreciated by his retainers. Jle 
 no longer went there to be petted— to run riot in boyish liveli- 
 ness, upsetting the housemaids' work-boxes, or making tofly 
 urder the cook's directions. As he became aware of his own 
 importance, he speedily developed into a juvenile tyrant ; he 
 became haughty and overbearing, hectored and swore, befouled 
 the snowy floors and ilags with his muddy shooting-boots, made 
 havoc and work wherever he went. The household treated him 
 with unfailing respect, as their late master's son, and their own 
 master, possibly, in the future ; but their service was no longer 
 the service of love. His loud strong voice, shouting in the 
 passages and lobbies, scared the maids at their tea. Grooms and 
 atable-boys b'ked him ; for with them he was always familiar,
 
 14 Mount Boyal. 
 
 and often friendly. He and they had tastes and occupations in 
 common ; but to the women servants and the grave middle-aged 
 butler his presence was a source of discomfort. 
 
 Next to her son in Mrs. Tregonell's affection stood her niece 
 ChristabeL That her love for the girl who had never given her 
 a moment's pain should be a lesser love than that which she bore 
 to the boy who had seldom given her an hour's unalloyed pleasure 
 was one of the anomalies common in the lives of good women. 
 To love blindly and unreasonably is as natural to a woman as it 
 is to love : and happy she whose passionate soul finds its idol in 
 husband or child, instead of being lured astray by strange lights 
 outside the safe harbour of home. Mrs. Tregonell loved her 
 niece _ very dearly ; but it was with that calm, comfortable 
 affection which mothers are apt to feel for the child who has 
 never given them any trouble. Christabel had been her pupil : 
 all that the girl knew had been learned from Mrs. Tregonell ; 
 and, though her education fell far short of the requirements of 
 Girton or Harley Street, there were few girls whose intellectual 
 powers had been more fully awakened, without the taint of 
 pedantry. Christabel loved books, but they were the books her 
 aunt had chosen for her — old-fasliioned books for the most part. 
 She loved music, but was no brilliant pianist, for when Mrs. 
 Tregonell, who had taught her carefully up to a certain point, 
 suggested a course of lessons from a German professor at Ply- 
 mouth, the girl recoiled from the idea of being taught by a 
 stranger. 
 
 'If you are satisfied with my playing, Auntie, I am content 
 never to play any better,' she said ; so the idea of six months' 
 tuition and study at Plymouth, involving residence in that lively 
 port, was abandoned. London was a far-away world, of which 
 neither aunt nor niece ever thought. That wild northern coast is 
 still two days' journey from the metropolis. Only by herculean 
 »abour, in the way of posting across the moor in the grey dawn 
 of morning, can the thing be done in one day ; and then scarcely 
 between sunrise and sunset. So Mrs. Tregonell, who loved a life 
 of placid repose, had never been to London since her widowhood, 
 and Ciiristabel had never been there at all. There was an old 
 house in Mayfair, which had belonged to the Tregonells for the 
 last hundred years, and which had cost them a fortune in repairs, 
 but it was either shut up and in the occupation of a caretaker, or 
 let furnished for the season ; and no Tregonell had crossed its 
 threshold since the Squire's death. Mrs. Tregonell talked of 
 spending a season in London before Christabel war, much older, 
 in order that her niece might be duly presented at Court, 
 and qualified for that place in society which a young lady 
 yi good family and ample means might fairly be entitled to 
 Hold.
 
 The Days that are No More. 15 
 
 Chrigtabcl had no eager desire for the gaieties of a London 
 season. She had spent six weeks in Bath, and had enjoyed an 
 occasional fortnight at Plymouth. She had been taken to 
 theatres and concerts, had seen some of the best actors and 
 actresses, heard a good deal of the finest music, and had been 
 duly delighted with all she saw and heard. But she so fondly 
 loved Mount Royal and its surroundings, she was so completely 
 happy in her home life, that she had no desire to change that 
 tranquil existence. She had a vague idea that London balls and 
 parties must be something very dazzling and brilliant, but she 
 was content to abide her aunt's pleasure and convenience for the 
 time in which she was to know more about metropolitan revelries 
 than was to be gathered from laudatory paragraphs in fashionable 
 newspapers. Youth, with its warm blood and active spirit, is 
 rarely so contented as Christabel was : but then youth is not 
 often placed amid such harmonious circumstances, so protected 
 from the approach of evil. 
 
 Christabel Courtenay may have thought and talked more 
 about Mr. Hamleigh during the two or three days that preceded 
 his arrival than was absolutely necessary, or strictly in accord- 
 ance with that common-sense which characterized most of her 
 acts and thoughts. She was interested in him upon two grounds 
 — first, because he was the only son of the man her aunt had 
 loved and mourned ; secondly, beoause he was the first stranger 
 who had ever come as a guest to Mount Royal. 
 
 Her aunt's visitors were mostly people whose faces she had 
 kiaown ever since she could remember : there were such wide 
 potentialities in the idea of a perfect stranger, who was to be 
 domiciled at the Mount for an indefinite period. 
 
 ' Suppose we don't like him 1 ' she said, speculatively, to Jessie 
 Bridgeman, Mrs. Tregonell's housekeeper, companion, and fac- 
 totum, who had lived at Mount Royal for the last six years, 
 coming there a girl of twenty, to make herself generally useful in 
 small girlish ways, and proving herself such a clever manager, so 
 bright, competent, and far-seeing, that she had been gradually 
 encrusted with every household care, from the largest to the 
 most minute. Miss Bridgeman was neither brilliant nor 
 accomplished, but she had a genius for homely things, and she 
 was admirable as a companion. 
 
 The two girls were out on the hills in the early autumn 
 morning — hills that were golden where the sun touched them, 
 purple in the shadow. The heather was fading, the patches of 
 tu i zc -blossom were daily growing rarer. Yet the hill-sides were 
 alive with light and colour, only less lovely than the translucent 
 blues and greens of yonder wide-stretching sea. 
 
 ' Suppose we should all dislike him 1 ' repeated Christabel, 
 digging the point of her walking-stick into a ferny hillock on the
 
 16 Mount fioyal. 
 
 topniust cdgq pf a deep clett in the hills, on which commanding 
 spot Bhe had just taken her stand, after bounding up the narrow 
 ] lit h from the little wooden bridge at the bottom of the glen, 
 almost as quickly and as lightly as if she had been one of the 
 deeply ruddled sheep that spent their lives on those precipitious 
 slopes ; 'wouldn't it be too dreadful, Jessie V 
 
 ' It would be inconvenient,' answered Miss Bridgeman, 
 coolly, resting both hands on the horny crook of her sturdy 
 "ml iella, and gazing placidly seaward ; ' but we could cut him. 
 
 1 Not without offending Auntie. She is sure to like him, for 
 the sake of Auld Lang Syne. Every look and tone of his will 
 recall his father. But we may detest him. And if he should 
 like Mount Royal very much, and go on staying there for ever ! 
 Auntie asked him for an indefinite period. She showed me her 
 letter. I thought it was rather too widely hospitable, but I did 
 not like to say so.' 
 
 ' I always say what I think,' said Jessie Bridgeman, dog- 
 gedly. 
 
 ' Of course you do, and go very near being disagreeable in 
 consequence.' 
 
 Miss Bridgeman's assertion was perfectly correct. A sturdy 
 truthfulness was one of her best qualifications. She did not volun- 
 teer unfavourable criticism; but if you asked her opinion upon 
 any subject you got it, without sophistication. It was her rare 
 merit to have lived with Mrs. Tregonell and Christabel Courtonay 
 six years, dependent upon their liking or caprice for all the conv 
 foi I i of her life, without having degenerated into a flatterer. 
 
 ' I haven't the slightest doubt as to your liking him,' said Miss 
 Bridgeman, decisively. 'He has spent his life for the most pa»t 
 in cities — and in good society. That I gather from your aunt's 
 account of him. He is sure to be much more interesting and 
 agreeable than the young men who live near here, whose ideas 
 are, for the most part, strictly local. But I very much doubt bis 
 liking Mount Royal, for more than one week.' 
 
 ' Jessie,' cried Christabel, indignantly, ' how can he help liking 
 this?' She waved her stick across the autumn landscape, describ- 
 ing a circle which included the gold and bronze hills, the shadowy 
 is, the bold headlands curving away to Hartland on one side, 
 to Tintagel on the other — Lundy Island a dim line of dun coloui 
 oa the horizon. 
 
 ' Xo doubt he will think it beautiful — in the abstract. He 
 will rave about it, compare it with the Scottish Highlands — with 
 Wales — with Kerry, declare three Cornish hills the crowning 
 glory of Britain. But in three days he will begin to detest a 
 place where there is only one post out and in, and where he has 
 to wait till next day for his morning paper' 
 
 ' What can he want with newspapers, if he is enjoying his life
 
 The Days that are No More. 17 
 
 Kith us? I am sure there are books enough at Mount "Royal 
 He need nut expire for want of something to read.' 
 
 'Do vou Buppose that books— -the best and aoblest that ever 
 were written — can make up to a man for the loss of his daily 
 paper? If you do, offer a man Shakespeare when he is looking 
 for the Daily Telegraph, or Chaucer when he wants his Times, 
 and see what he will say to you. Men don't want to read now- 
 adays, but to know — to be posted in the very latest movements of 
 their fellow-men all over the universe. Reuter's column is all 
 anybody really cares for in the paper. The leaders and the 
 criticism are only so much padding to fill the sheet. People 
 would be better pleased if there were nothing but telegrams.' 
 
 ' A man who only reads newspapers must be a most vapid com- 
 panion,' said Christabel. 
 
 ' Hardly, for he must be brim full of facts.' 
 
 ' I abhor facts. Well, if Mr. Hamleigh is that kind of 
 pei-son, I hope he may be tired of the Mount in less than a 
 week.' 
 
 She was silent and thoughtful as they went home by the 
 monastic churchyard in the hollow, the winding lane and steep 
 tillage street. Jessie had a message to carry to one of Mrs. 
 Tregonell'a pensioners, who lived in a cottage in the lane ; but 
 Christabel, who was generally pleased to show her fair young face 
 in such abodes, waited outside on this occasion, and stood in a 
 profound reverie, digging the point of her stick into the looso 
 earth of the mossy bank in front of her, and seriously damaging 
 the landscape. 
 
 ' I hate a man who does not care for books, who does not 
 love our dear English poets,' she said to herself. ' But I must 
 not say that before Auntie. It would be almost like saving that 
 I hated my cousin Leonard. I hope Mr Hamleigh .ill be — 
 just a little different from Leonard. Of course he will, if his life 
 has been spent in cities ; but then he may be languid and super- 
 cilious, looking upon Jessie and me as inferior creatures ; and 
 that would be worse than Leonard's roughness. For we all know 
 what a good heart Leonard has, and how warmly attached he ia 
 to us.' 
 
 Somehow the idea of Leonard's excellent heart and affec- 
 tionate disposition was not altogether a pleasant one. Christabel 
 Bhuddered ever so faintly as she stood in the lane thinking of her 
 cousin, who had last been heard of in the Fijis. She banished 
 his image with an effort, and returned to her consideration of 
 tluit unknown quantity, Angus Hamleigh. 
 
 ' 1 am an idiot to Ik- making fancy pictures of him, when at 
 Bev n o'clock this evening 1 shall know all about him for good or 
 evil,' she said aloud, as Jessie came out of the cottage, which 
 nebtled low down in its little garden, with a slate for a doorstep.
 
 I© Mount Royal. 
 
 and a slate standing on end at each side of the door, for boundary 
 line, or ornament. 
 
 ' All that is to be known of the outside of him,' said Jessie, 
 answering the girl's outspoken thought. ' If he is really worth 
 knowing, his mind will need a longer study.' 
 
 ' I think I shall know at the first glance if he is likeable,' 
 replied Christabel ; and then, with a tremendous effort, she 
 contrived to talk about other things as they went down the High 
 Street of Boscastle, which, to people accustomed to a level world, 
 is rather trying. With Christabel the hills were only an excuse 
 for flourishing a Swiss walking-stick. The stick was altogether 
 needless for support to that light well-balanced figure. Jessie, 
 who was very small and slim and sure-footed, always carried her 
 stout little umbrella, winter or summer. It was her vade-mecum 
 — good against rain, or sun, or mad bulls, or troublesome dogs. 
 She would have scorned the affectation of cane or alpenstock : 
 but the sturdy umbrella was vary dear to her. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 BUT THEN CAME ONE, THE LOVELACE OF HIS DAT. 
 
 A-Lthoitgh Angus Hamleigh came of a good old west country 
 family, he had never been in Cornwall, and he approached that 
 remote part of the country with a curious feeling that he was 
 turning' his back upon England and English civilization, and 
 entering a strange wild land where all things would be different. 
 He would meet with a half-barbarous people, perhaps, rough, 
 unkempt, ignorant, brutal, speaking to him in a strange language 
 —such men as inhabited Perthshire and Inverness before civili- 
 zation travelled northward. He had accepted Mrs. Tregonell's 
 invitation out of kindly feeling for the woman who had loved 
 his father, and who, but for that father's untimely death, might 
 have been to him as a second mother. There was a strong vein 
 of sentiment in his character, which responded to the sentiment 
 betrayed unconsciously in every line of Mrs. Tregonell's letter. 
 His only knowledge of the father he had lost in infancy had 
 come to him from the lips of others, and it pleased him to think 
 that here was one whose memory must be fresher than that of 
 any other friend in whose mind his father's image must needs be 
 as a living thing. He had all his life cherished a regretful 
 fondneas for that unknown father, whose shadowy picture ho 
 had vainly tried to recall among the first faint recollections of 
 babyhood- -the dim dreamland of half -awakened consciousness. 
 He had frankly and promptly accepted Mrs. Tregonell's iiyvi-
 
 But tJien came One, the Lovelace of his Day. 19 
 
 tation ; yet he felt that in going to immure himself in an 
 ■vld manor house for a fortnight — anything less than a fort- 
 night would have been uncivil — he .•was dooming himself to 
 ineffable boredom. Beyond that pious pleasure in parental 
 reminiscences, there could be no possible gratification for a 
 man of the world, who was not an ardent sportsman, in such 
 a place as Mount Royal. Mr. Hamleigh's instincts were 
 of the town, towny. His pleasures were all of an intellectual 
 kind. He had never degraded himself by vulgar profligacy, 
 but he liked a life of excitement and variety ; he had always 
 lived at high pressure, and among people posted up to the 
 last moment of the world's history — people who drank the 
 very latest pleasure cup which the Spirt of the Age — a Spirit of 
 passing frivolity — had invented, were it only the newest brand 
 of champagne ; and who, in their eagerness to gather the roses ol 
 life, outotripped old Time himself, and grew old in advance of 
 their age. He had been contemplating a fortnight in Paris, as 
 the first stage in his journey to Monaco, when Mrs. Tregonell's 
 letter altered his plans. This was not the first time she had 
 asked him to Mount Royal, but on previous occasions his engage- 
 ments had seemed to him too imperative to be foregone, and he had 
 regretfully declined her invitations. But now the flavour of life 
 had grown somewhat vapid for him, and he was grateful to anyone 
 who would turn his thoughts and fancies into a new direction. 
 
 ' I shall inevitably be bored there,' he said to himself, when 
 he had littered the railway carriage with newspapers accumulated 
 on the way, ' but I should be bored anywhere else. When a 
 man begins to feel the pressure of the chain upon his leg, it 
 cannot much matter where his walks lead him : the very act of 
 walking is his punishment.' 
 
 When a man comes to eight-and-twenty years of age — a mar 
 who has had very little to do in this life, except take his pleasure 
 — a great weariness and sense of exhaustion is apt to close round 
 him like a pall. The same man will be ever so much fresher 
 in mind, will have ever so much more zest for life, when lie 
 comes to be forty — for then he will have entered upon those 
 calmer enjoyments of middle age which may last him till he is 
 eight)'. But at eight-and-twenty there is a death-like calmness 
 of feeling. Youth is gone. He has consumed all the first-fruits 
 of life — spring and summer, with their wealth of flowers, are 
 over ; only the quiet autumn remains for him, with her warm 
 browns and dull greys, and cool, moist breath. The fires upon 
 youth's altars have all died out — youth is dead, and the man who 
 was young only yesterday fancies that he might as well be dead 
 also. What is there left for him 1 Can there be any charm in 
 this life when the loeker-on has grey hair and wrinkles 1 
 
 Having nothing in life to do except seek his own pleasure
 
 20 Mount Royal. 
 
 and spend his ample income, Angus Hamleigh had naturally 
 taken the time of life's march prestissimo. 
 
 He had never paused in his rose-gathering to wonder 
 whether there might not be a few thorns among the flowers, and 
 whether he might not find them — afterwards. And now the 
 blossoms were all withered, and he was beginning to discover the 
 lasting quality of the thorns. They were such thorns as inter- 
 fered somewhat with the serenity of his days, and he was glad 
 to turn his face westward, away from everybody he knew, or 
 who knew anything about him. 
 
 ' My character will present itself to Mrs. Tregonell as a blank 
 page,' he said to himself ; ' I wonder what she would think of 
 me if one of my club gossips had enjoyed a quiet evening's talk 
 with her beforehand. A dear friend's analysis of one's character 
 and conduct is always so flattering to both ; and 1 have a plea- 
 sant knack of offending my dearest friends ! ' 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh began to look about him a little when the 
 train had left Plymouth. The landscape was wild and romantic, 
 but had none of that stern ruggedneaa which he expected to 
 behold on the Cornish Border. Deep glens, and wooded dells, 
 with hill-sides steep and broken, but verdant to their topmost 
 crest, and the most wonderful oak coppices that he ever remem- 
 bered to have seen. Miles upon miles of oak, as it seemed to 
 him, now sinking into the depth of a valley, now mounting to the 
 distant sky line, while from that verdant undulating surface of 
 young wood there stood f )rth the giants of the grove — wide- 
 spreading oak and towering beech, the mighty growth of many 
 centuries Between Lidford and Launceston the scenery grew 
 tamer. He had fancied those deep ravines and wooded heights 
 the prelude to a vast and awful symphony, but Mary Tavy and 
 Lifton showed him only a pastoral landscape, with just so much 
 wood and water as would have served for a Creswick or a Con- 
 stable, and with none of those grand Salvatoresque effects 
 which he had admired in the country round Tavistock. At 
 launceston he found Mrs. Tregonell : s landau waiting for him, 
 with a pair of powerful chestnuts, and a couple of servants, whose 
 neat brown liberies had nothing of that unsophisticated semi- 
 savagery which Mr. Hamleigh had expected in a place so remote. 
 
 ' Do you drive that way ? ' he asked, pointing to the almost 
 perpendicular street, 
 
 ' Yes, sir,' replied the coachman. 
 
 ' Then I think I'll stroll to the top of the hill while you are 
 putting in my portmanteaux,' he said, and ascended the rustic 
 street at a leisurely pace, looking about him as he went. 
 
 The thoroughface which leads from Launceston Station to tha 
 ruined castle at the top of the hill is not an imposing promenade. 
 Its architectural features might perhaps be best described like
 
 But then came One, the Lovelace of his Day. 21 
 
 ihe snakes of Ireland as nil — but here and there an old-fashioned 
 lattice with a row of flower-pots, an ancient gable, or a bit of 
 cottage garden hints at the picturesque. Any late additions to 
 the domestic architecture of Launceston favour the unpretending 
 usefulness of Camden Town rather than the aspiring aesthetic! >in 
 of Chelsea or Bedford Park ; but to Mr. Hamleigh's eye the 
 rugged old castle keep on the top of the hill made amends. He 
 was not an ardent archaeologist, and he did not turn out of his 
 way to see Launceston Chivrch, which might well have rewarded 
 him for his trouble. He was content to have spared those good- 
 looking chestnuts the labour of dragging liim up the steep. 
 Here they came springing up the hill He took his place in the 
 carriage, pulled the fur rug over his knees, and ensconced him- 
 self comfortably in the roomy back seat. 
 
 ' This is a sybaritish luxury which I was not prepared for,' he 
 said to himself. ' I'm afraid I shall be rather more bored than I 
 expected. I thought Mrs. Tregonell and her surroundings would 
 at least have the merit of originality. But here is a carriage 
 that must have been built by Peters, and liveries that suggest 
 the sartorial excellence of Conduit Street or Savile Row.' 
 
 He watched the landscape with a critical eye, prepared for 
 disappointment and disillusion. First a country road between 
 tall ragged hedges and steep banks, a road where every now and 
 then the branches of the trees hung low over the carriage, and 
 threatened to knock the coachman's hat off. Then they came out 
 upon the wide waste of moorland, a thousand feet above the sea 
 level, and Mr. Hamleigh, acclimatized to the atmosphere of club- 
 houses, buttoned his overcoat, drew the black fur rug closer 
 about him, and shivered a little as the keen breath of the 
 Atlantic, sweeping over far-reaching tracts of hill and heather, 
 blew round him. Far and wide as his gaze could reach, he saw 
 uo sign of human habitation. Was the land utterly forsaken ? 
 No ; a little farther on they passed a hamlet so insignificant, so 
 isolated, that it seemed rather as if half a dozen cottages had 
 dropped from the sky than that so lonely a settlement could be 
 the result of deliberate human inclination Never in Scotland 
 or Ireland had Mr. Hamleigh seen a more barren landscape or a 
 poorer soil ; yet those wild wastes of heath, those distant tors 
 were passing beautiful, and the air he breathed was more in- 
 spiring and exhilarating than the atmosphere of any vaunted 
 health-resort which he had ever visited. 
 
 ' I think I might live to middle age if I were to pitch my tent 
 on Litis Cornish plateau,' he thought ; ' but, then, there are s4 
 many things in this life that are worth more than mere length of 
 days.' 
 
 lb- asked the names of the hamlets they passed. This lonely 
 church, dedicated to St. David — whence, oh ! whence came the
 
 -12 Mount Royal. 
 
 congregation — belonged to the parish of Davidstowe ; and here 
 there was a holy well ; and here a Vicarage ; and there — oh ! 
 crowning evidence of civilization — a post-office ; and there a 
 farm-house ; and that was the end of Davidstowe. A little later 
 they came to cross roads, and the coachman touched his hat, and 
 said, ' This is Victoria,' as if he were naming a town or settlement 
 of some kind. Mr. Hamleigh looked about him, and beheld a 
 low-roofed cottage, which he assumed to be some kind of public- 
 house, possibly capable of supplying beer and tobacco ; but other 
 vestige of human habitation there was none. He leant back in 
 the carriage, looking across the hills, and saying to himself, 
 ' Why, Victoria ? ' Was that unpretentious and somewhat 
 dilapidated hostelry the Victoria Hotel ? or the Victoria Arms % 
 or was Royalty's honoured name given, in an arbitrary manner, 
 to the cross roads and the granite finger-post ? He never knew. 
 The coachman said shortly, ' Victoria,' and as ' Victoria ' he ever 
 after heard that spot described. And now the journey was all 
 downhill. They drove downward and downward, intil Mr. 
 Hamleigh began to feel as if they were travelling towards the 
 centre of the earth — as if they had got altogether below the outer 
 crust of this globe, and must be gradually nearing the unknown 
 gulfs beneath. Yet, by some geographical mystery, v lien they 
 turned out of the high road and went in at a lodge gate, and 
 drove gently upward along an avenue of elms, in whose rugged 
 tops the rooks were screaming, Mr. Hamleigh found that he was 
 rttill high above the undidating edges of the cliffs that overtopped 
 the Atlantic, while the great waste of waters lay far below 
 golden with the last rays of the setting sun. 
 
 They drove, by a gentle ascent, to the stone porch of Mount 
 Royal, and here Mrs. Tregonell stood, facing the sunset, with an 
 Indian shawl wrapped round her, waiting for her guest. 
 
 ' I heard the carriage, Mr. Hamleigh,' she said, as Angus 
 alighted : ' I hope you do not think me too impatient to see 
 what change twelve years have made in you ? ' 
 
 4 I'm afraid they have not been particularly advantageous to 
 me,' he answered, lightly, as they shook hands. ' How good of 
 you to receive me on the threshold ! and what a delightful 
 place you have here ! Before I got to Launceston, I began to be 
 afraid that Cornwall was commonplace — and now I'm enchanted 
 with it. Your moors and hills are like fairy-land to me ! ' 
 
 ' It is a world of our own, and we are very fond of it,' said the 
 widow ; ' I shall be sorry if ever a railway makes Boscastle open 
 to everybody.' 
 
 'And what a noble old house !' exclaimed Angus, as he 
 followed his hostess across the oak-panelled hall, with its wide 
 shallow staircase, curiously carved balustrades, and lantern root 
 ' Are you quite alone here 1 '
 
 But then came One, the Lovelace of his Day. l 2ii 
 
 ' Oh, no ; I have my niece, and a youngslady who is a com- 
 panion to both of us.' 
 
 Angus Hamleigh shuddered. 
 
 Three women ! He was to exist for a fortnight in a house with 
 three solitary females. A niece and a companion ! The niece 
 rustic and gawky ; the companion sour and frumpish. He began, 
 hurriedly, to cast about in his mind for a convenient friend, to 
 whom he could telegraph to send him a telegram, summoning 
 him back to London on urgent business. He was still medi- 
 tating this, when the butler opened the door of a spacious room, 
 lined from floor to ceiling with books, and he followed Mrs. 
 Tregonell in, and found himself in the bosom of the family. The 
 simple picture of home-comfort, of restfulness and domestic peace, 
 which met his curious gaze as he entered, pleased him better than 
 anything he had seen of late. Club life — with its too studious 
 indulgence of man's native selfishness and love of ease — fashion- 
 able life, with its insatiable craving for that latter-day form of 
 display which calls itself Culture, Art, or Beauty — had afforded 
 him novisionso enchanting asthewide hearth and high chimnevof 
 this sober, book-lined room,with the fair and girlish form kneeling 
 in front of the old dogstove, framed in the glaring light of the fire. 
 
 The tea-table had been wheeled near the hearth, and Mrs. 
 Bridgeman sat before the bright red tea-tray, and old brass 
 kettle, ready to administer to the wants of the traveller, who 
 would be hardly human if he did not thirst for a cup of tea after 
 driving across the moor. Christabel knelt in front of the fire, 
 worshipping, and being worshipped by, a sleek black-and-white 
 sheep-dog, native to the soil, and of a rare intelligence — a creature 
 by no means approaching the Scotch colley in physical beauty, 
 but of a fond and faithful nature, born to be the friend of man. 
 As Christabel rose and turned to greet the stranger, Mr. Ham- 
 leigh was agreeably reminded of an old picture — a Lely or a 
 Kneller, perhaps. This was not in any wise the rustic image 
 which had flashed across his mind at the mention of Mrs. 
 TregonelFs niece. He had expected to see a bouncing, countryfied 
 maiden — rosy, buxom, the picture of commonplace health and 
 vigour. The girl he saw was nearer akin to the lily than the 
 rose — tall, slender, dazzlingly fair — not fragile or sickly in any- 
 wise — for the erect figure was finely moulded, the swan-like throat 
 was round and full. He was prepared for the florid beauty of a 
 milkmaid, and he found himself face to face with the elegance of an 
 ideal duchess, the picturesque loveliness of an old Venetian 
 portrait. 
 
 Christabel's dark brown velvet gown and square point lace 
 collar, the bright hair falling in shadowy curls over her forehead, 
 and rolled into a loose knot at the back of her head, sinned in 
 no wise against Mr. Hamleigh's notions of good taste. Then
 
 24, Mount Boy at,. 
 
 was a picfeuresqueness about the style which indicated that Misa 
 Courtenay belonged to that advanced section of womankind 
 which takes if.s ideas less from modern fashion-plates than from 
 old pictures. So long as her archaism went no further back than 
 Vandyke or Moroni he would admire and approve ; but he 
 shuddered at the thought that to-morrow she might burst upon 
 him in a mediaeval morning-gown, with high-shouldered sleeves, 
 a rutf, and a satchel. The picturesque idea was good, within 
 limits ; but one never knew how far it might go. 
 
 There was nothing picturesque about the lady sitting before 
 the tea-tray, who looked up brightly, and gave him a gracious 
 bend of her small neat head, in acknowledgment of Mrs. Tre- 
 gonell's introduction — ' Mr. Hamleigh, Miss Bridgeman !' This 
 was the companion — and the companion was plain : not un- 
 pleasantly plain, not in any matter repulsive, but a lady about 
 whose looks there could be hardly any compromise. Her com- 
 plexion was of a sallow darkness, unrelieved by any glow of 
 colour ; her eyes were grey, acute, honest, friendly, but not 
 beautiful ; her nose was sharp and pointed — not at all a bad 
 nose ; but there was a hardness about nose and mouth and chin, 
 as of features cut out of bone with a very sharp knife. Her 
 teeth were good, and in a lovelier mouth might have been the 
 object of much admiration. Her hair was of that nondescript 
 monotonous brown which has be?n unkindly called bottle-green, 
 but it was arranged with admirable neatness, and offended less 
 than many a tangled pate, upon whose locks of spurious gold 
 the owner has wasted much time and money. There was nothing 
 unpardonable in Miss Bridgeman's plainness, as Angus Hamleigh 
 said of her later. Her small figure was neatly made, and her 
 dark-grey gown fitted to perfection. 
 
 ' I hope you like the little bit of Cornwall that you have seen 
 this afternoon, Mr. Hamleigh,' said Christabel, seating herself in 
 a low chair in the shadow of the tall chimney-piece, fenced in by 
 her aunt's larger chair. 
 
 ' I am enraptured with it ! I came here with the desire to be 
 intensely Cornish. I am prepared to believe in witches — war- 
 locks ' 
 
 • We have no warlocks,' said Christabel. ' They belong to the 
 North.' 
 
 ' Well, then, wise women — wicked young men who play foot- 
 ball on Sunday, and get themselves turned into granite — rocking 
 stones — magic wells — Druids — and King Arthur. I believe the 
 principal point is to be open to conviction about Arthur. Now, 
 1 am prepared to swallow everything — his castle — the river 
 where his crown w;is found after the fight — was it his crown, by- 
 the-by, or somebody else's ? which lie found — his hair-brushes— 
 his boots — anything you please to show me.'
 
 But then came One, the Lovelace of his Day. 25 
 
 'We will show you his quoit to-morrow, on the road to Tin- 
 fcagel,' said Miss Bridgeraan. ' I don't think you would like to 
 swallow that actually. He hurled it from Tintagel to Trevalga 
 in one of his sportive moods. We shall be able to give you 
 plenty of amusement if you are a good walker, and are fond of 
 hills.' 
 
 ' I adore them in the abstract, contemplated from one'a 
 windows, or in a picture ; but there is an incompatibility between 
 the human anatomy and a road set on end. like a ladder, which 
 I have never yet overcome. Apart from the outside question of 
 my legs — which are obvious failures when tested by an angle of 
 forty-hve degrees — I'm afraid my internal machinery is not 
 quite so tough as it ought to be for a thorough enjoyment of 
 mountaineering.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell sighed, ever so faintly, in the twilight. She 
 was thinking of her hrst lover, and how that fragility, which 
 meant early death, had showed itself in his inability to 
 enjoy the moorland walks which were the delight of her girl- 
 hood. 
 
 ' The natural result of bad habits,' said Miss Bridgeman, 
 briskly. ' How can you expect to be strong or active, when I 
 dare say you have spent the better part of your life in hansom 
 cabs and express trains ! I don't mean to be impertinent, but I 
 know that is the general way with gentlemen out of the shooting 
 and hunting season.' 
 
 ' And as I am no sportsman, I am a somewhat exaggerated 
 example of the vice of laziness fostered by congenial circum- 
 stances, acting on a lymphatic temperament. If you write books, 
 8j? I believe most ladies do now-a-days, you shall put me in one 
 of them, as an awful warning.' 
 
 ' I don't write books, and, if I did, I would not flatter your 
 vanity by making you my model sinner,' retorted Jessie ; ' but 
 I'll do something better for you, if Christabel will help me. I'll 
 reform you.' 
 
 ' A million thanks for the mere thought ! I hope the process 
 will be pleasant.' 
 
 ' I hope so, too. We shall begin by walking you off your 
 legs.' 
 
 ' They are so indifferent as a means of locomotion that I could 
 very well afford to lose them, if you could hold out any hope 
 of my getting a better pair.' 
 
 'A week hence, if you submit to my treatment, you will be 
 as active as the chamoise hunger in '' Minified." ' 
 
 'Enchanting — always provided that you and Miss Courtenay 
 will follow the chase with me.' 
 
 'Depend upon it, we nhaU not trust yon to take your walks 
 alone, unless you have a pedometer which will bear witness to
 
 26 Mount Boyal. 
 
 the distance you have done, and which you will be content 
 to submit to our inspection on your return,' replied Jessie, 
 Bternly. 
 
 ' I am afraid you are a terribly severe high priestess of Oih 
 new form of culture,' said Mr. Hamleigh, looking up from his tea- 
 cup with a lazy smile, 'almost as bad as the Dweller on the 
 Threshold, in Bulwer's " Zanoni." ' 
 
 ' There is a dweller on the threshold of every science and every 
 admirable mode of life, and his name is Idleness," answered Miss 
 Bridgeman. 
 
 ' The vis inertice, the force of letting things alone,' said Angus ; 
 ' yes, that is a tremendous power, nobly exemplified by vestries 
 and boards of works — to say nothing of Cabinets, Bishops, and 
 the High Court of Chancery ! I delight in that verse of Scripture, 
 "Their strength is to sit still.'" 
 
 ' There shall be very little sitting still for you if you submit 
 yourself to Christabel and me,' replied Miss Bridgeman. 
 
 ' I have never tried the water-cure — the descriptions I have 
 heard from adepts have been too repellent ; but I have an idea 
 that this system of yours must be rather worse than hydropathy, 
 said Angus, musingly — evidently very much entertained at the 
 way in which Miss Bridgeman had taken him in hand. 
 
 ' I was not going to let him pose after Lamartine's poete 
 mourant, just because his father died of lung disease,' said Jessie, 
 ten minutes afterwards, when the warning gong had sounded, 
 and Mr. Hamleigh had gone to his room to dress for dinner, and 
 the two young women were whispering together before the fire, 
 while Mrs. Tregonell indulged in a placid doze. 
 
 ' Do you think he is consumptive, like his father ? ' asked 
 Christabel, with a compassionate look ; ' he has a very delicate 
 appearance.' 
 
 ' Hollow-cheeked, and prematurely old, like a man who has 
 lived on tobacco and brandy-and-soda, and has spent his nights 
 in elub-house card-rooms.' 
 
 ' We have no right to suppose that,' said Christabel, ' since 
 we know really nothing about him.' 
 
 ' Major Bree told me he has lived a racketty life, and that if 
 he were not to pull up very soon he would be ruined both in 
 health and fortune.' 
 
 ' What can the Major know about him 1 ' exclaimed Christ* 
 abel, contemptuously. 
 
 This Major Bree was a great friend of Christabel's ; but there 
 Are times when one's nearest and dearest are too provoking for 
 endurances. 
 
 ' Major Bree has been buried alive in Cornwall for the last 
 twenty years. He is at least a quarter of a century behind the 
 age,' she said, impatiently.
 
 But then came One, the Lovelace of his Day. 2? 
 
 ' He spent a fortnight in London the year before last,' said 
 Jessie ; ' it was then that he heard such a bad account of Mr. 
 Hamleigh.' 
 
 ' Did he go about to clubs and places making inquiries, like & 
 private detective ? ' said Christabel, still contemptuous ; ' I hate 
 such fetching and carrying !' 
 
 1 Here he comes to answer for himself,' replied Jessie, as the 
 door opened, and a servant announced Major Bree. 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell started from her slumbers at the opening of 
 the door, and rose to greet her guest. He was a very frequent 
 visitor, so frequent that he might be said to live at Mount Royal, 
 although his nominal abode was a cottage on the outskirts of 
 Boscastle — a stone cottage on the crest of a steep hill-side, with 
 a delightful little garden, perched, as it were, on the edge of a 
 verdant abyss. He was tall, stout, elderly, grey, and florid — 
 altogether a comfortable-looking man, clean shaved, save for a 
 thin grey moustache with the genuine cavalry droop, iron grey 
 eyebrows, which looked like a repetition of the moustache on a 
 somewhat smaller scale, keen grey eyes, a pleasant smile, and a 
 well set-up tigure. He dressed well, with a sobriety becoming 
 his years, and was always the pink of neatness. A man welcome 
 everywhere, on account of an inborn pleasantness, which 
 prompted him always to say and do the right thing ; but most 
 of all welcome at Mount Royal, as a first cousin of the late 
 Squire's, and Mrs. Tregonell's guide, philosopher, and friend in 
 all matters relating to the outside world, of which, despite his 
 twenty years' hybernation at Boscastle, the widow supposed him 
 to be an acute observer and an infallible judge. Was he not 
 one of the few inhabitants of that western village who took in 
 the Times newspaper % 
 
 ' Well ! ' exclaimed Major Bree, addressing himself generally 
 to the three ladies, ' he has come — what do you think of him?' 
 
 ' He is painfully like his poor father,' said Mrs. Tregonell. 
 
 1 He has a most interesting face and winning manner, and 
 I'm afraid we shall all get ridiculously fond of him,' said Miss 
 Bridgeman, decisively. 
 
 Christabel said nothing. She knelt on the hearth-rug, play- 
 ing with Randie, the black-and-white sheep-dog. 
 
 • And what have you to say about him, Christabel % ' asked 
 the Major. 
 
 ' Nothing. I have not had time to form an opinion,' replied 
 tftie girl; and then lifting her clear blue eyes to the Major's 
 friendly face, she said, gravely, " but I think, Uncle Oliver, it 
 was very unkind and unfair of you to prejudice Jessie against 
 him before he came here.' 
 
 ' Unkind ! — unfair 1 Here's a shower of abuse 1 I prejudice ! 
 Oh 1 I remember. Mm Tregonell asked me what people thought
 
 28 Mount Boy at. 
 
 of him in London, and I was obliged to acknowledge that his 
 reputation was — well— no better than that of the majority of 
 young men who have more money than common sense. But 
 that was two years ago— Nous avons changS tout cela ! ' 
 
 'If he was wicked then, he must be wicked now,' said 
 Christabel. 
 
 ' Wicked is a monstrously strong word ! ' said the Major. 
 ' Besides, that does not follow. A man may have a few wild 
 oats to sow, and yet become a very estimable person afterwards. 
 Miss Bridgeman is tremendously sharp— she'll be able to find out 
 all about Mr. Hamleigh from personal observation before he has 
 been here a week. I defy him to hide his weak points from 
 her.' 
 
 ' What is the use of being plain and insignificant if one has 
 not some advantage over one's superior fellow-creatures ? ' asked 
 Jessie. 
 
 ' Miss Bridgeman has too much expression to be plain, and she is 
 far too clever to be insignificant,' said Major Bree, with a stately 
 bow. He always put on a stately manner when he addressed 
 himself to Jessie Bridgeman, and treated her in all things with as 
 much respect as if she had been a queen. He explained to 
 Christabel that this was the homage which he paid to the royalty 
 of intellect ; but Christabel had a shrewd suspicion that the 
 Major cherished a secret passion for Miss Bridgeman, as exalted 
 and as hopeless as the love that Chastelard bore for Mary Stuart. 
 He had only a small pittance besides his half-pay, and he had a 
 very poor opinion of his own merits ; so it was but natural that, 
 at fifty-five, he should hesitate to offer himself to a young lady 
 of six-and-twenty, of whose sharp tongue he had a wholesome 
 awe. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh came back before much more could be said 
 about him, and a few minutes afterwards they all went in to 
 dinner, and in the brighter lamplight of the dining-room Major 
 Bree and the three ladies had a better opportunity of forming 
 their opinion as to the external graces of their guest. 
 
 He was good-looking — that fact even malice could hardly 
 dispute. Not so handsome as the absent Leonard, Mrs. Tre- 
 gonell told herself complacently ; but she was constrained at 
 the same time to acknowledge that her son's broadly moulded 
 features and florid complexion lacked the charm and interest 
 which a woman's eye found in the delicate chiselling and subdued 
 tones of Angus Hamleigh's countenance. His eyes were darkest 
 grey, his complexion was fair and somewhat pallid, his hair 
 brown, with a natural curl whi< neither fashion nor the barber 
 could altogether suppress. Hi cheeks were more sunken than 
 they should have been at eight-and-twenty, and the large dark 
 eyes were unnaturally bright. Ail this the three ladies and
 
 But then came One, the Lovelace of his Day. 29 
 
 Major Bree had ample time for observing, during the leisurely 
 course of dinner. There was no nagging in the conversation^ 
 from the beginning to the end of the repast. Mr. Hamleigb 
 was ready to talk about anything and everything, and his 
 interest in the most trifling local subjects, whether real or 
 assumed, made him a delightful companion. In the drawing- 
 room, after dinner, he proved even more admirable ; for he dis- 
 covered a taste for, and knowledge of, the best music, which 
 delighted Jessie and Christabel, who were both enthusiasts. 
 He "had read every book they cared for — and a wide world of 
 books besides— and was able to add to their stock of information 
 upon all their favourite subjects, without the faintest touch of 
 arrogance. 
 
 ' I don't think you can help liking him, Jessie,' said Christabel, 
 as the two girls went upstairs to bed. The younger lingered a 
 little in Miss Bridgeman's room for the discussion of their latest 
 ideas. There was a cheerful fire burning in the large basket 
 grate, for autumn nights were chill upon that wild coast. 
 Christabel assumed her favourite attitude in front of the fire, 
 with her faithful Bandie winking and blinking at her and the 
 fire alternate] v. He was a privileged dog — allowed to sleep on 
 a sheepskin mat in the gallery outside his mistress's door, and to 
 go into her room every morning, in company with the maid who 
 carried her early cup of tea , when, after the exchange of a few 
 remarks, in baby language on her part, and expressed on his by 
 a series of curious grins and much wagging of his insignificant 
 apology for a tail, he would dash out of the room, and out of the 
 house/for his morning constitutional among the sheep upon some 
 distant hill — coming home with an invigorated appetite, in 
 time for the family breakfast at nine o'clock. 
 
 'I don't think you can help liking him — as — as a casual 
 acquaintance ! ' repeated Christabel, finding that Jessie stood in 
 a dreamy silence, twisting her one diamond ring — a birthday 
 gift from Miss Courtenay — round and round upon her slender 
 linger. 
 
 ' I don't suppose any of us can help liking him,' Jessie 
 answered at last, with her eyes on the fire All I hope is, 
 that some of us will notlikehirn too much. He has brought a new 
 element into our lives — a new interest — which may end by 
 being a painful one. I feel distrustful of him.' 
 
 'Why distrustful ? Why, Jessie, you who are generally the 
 ~ery essence of flippancy — who make light of almost everything 
 in life— except religion — thank God, you have not come to that 
 yet ! — you to be so serious about such a trifling matter as a visit 
 from a man who will most likely be gone back to London in a 
 fortnight — gone out of our lives altogether, perhaps : for I don't 
 suppose he will care to repeat hia experiences in a ionely country- 
 homo.'
 
 30 Mount Boyal. 
 
 '• He may be gone, perhaps — yes — and it is quite possible thai 
 he may never return — but shall we be quite the same after he 
 has left us 1 Will nobody regret him — wish for his return — 
 yearn for it — sigh for it — die for it — feeling life worthless — a 
 burthen, without him ? ' 
 
 ' Why, Jessie, you look like a Pythoness.' 
 
 ' Belle, Belle, my darling, my innocent one, you do not know 
 what it fei to care — for a bright particular star — and know how 
 remote it is from your life— never to be brought any nearer ! 
 I felt afraid to-night when I saw you and Mr. Hamleigh at the 
 piano — you playing, he leaning over you as you played — both 
 seeming so happy, so united by the sympathy of the moment ! 
 If he is not a good man — if ' 
 
 ' But we have no reason to think ill of him. You remember 
 what Uncle Oliver said — he had only been — a — a little racketty, 
 like other young men,' said Christabel, eagerly ; and then, with 
 a sudden embarrassment, reddening and laughing shyly, she 
 added, 'and indeed, Jessie, if it is any idea of danger to me that 
 is troubling your wise head, there is no need for alarm. I am 
 not made of such inflammable stuff — I am not the kind of girl to 
 fall in love with the first comer.' 
 
 ' With the first comer, no ! But when the Prince comes in a 
 fairy tale, it matters little whether he comes first or last. Fate 
 has settled the whole story beforehand.' 
 
 ' Fate has had nothing to say about me and Mr. Hamleigh. 
 No, Jessie, believe me, there is no danger for me — and I don't 
 suppose that you are going to fall in love with him 1 ' 
 
 ' Because I am so old ? ' said Miss Bridgeman, still looking at 
 the fire ; ' no, it would be rather ridiculous in a person of my 
 age, plain and passee, to fall in love with your Alcibiades.' 
 
 ' No, Jessie, but because you are too wise ever to be carried 
 away by a sentimental fancy. But why do you speak of him so 
 contemptuously ? One would think you had taken a dislike to 
 him. We ought at least to remember that he is my aunt's 
 friend, and the son of some one she once dearly loved.' 
 
 ' Once,' repeated Jessie, softly ; ' does not once in that case 
 mean always 1 ' 
 
 She was thinking of the Squire's commonplace good looks and 
 portly figure, as represented in the big picture in the dining- 
 room — the picture of a man in a red coat, leaning against the 
 shoulder of a big bay horse, and with a pack of harriers fawning 
 round him — and wondering whether the image of that dead 
 man, whose son was in the house to-night, had not sometimes 
 obtruded itself upon the calm plenitude of Mrs. Tregonell's 
 domestic joys. 
 
 ' Don't be afraid that I shall forget my duty to your aunt or 
 four aunt's guest, dear,' she said suddenly, as if awakened from
 
 But then came One, the Lovelace of his Day. 81 
 
 1 reverie. ' You and I will do all in our power to make him 
 happy, and to shake him out of lazy London ways, and then, 
 when we have patched up his health, and the moorland air has 
 blown a little colour into his hollow cheeks, we will send him 
 back to his clubs and his theatres, and forget all about him. 
 And now, good-night, my Christabel,' she said, looking at her 
 watch ; see ! it is close upon midnight — dreadful dissipation for 
 Mount Royal, where half-past ten is the usual hour.' 
 
 Christabel kissed her and departed, Randie following to the 
 door of her chamber — such a pretty room, with old panelled 
 walls painted pink and grey, old furniture, old china, snowy 
 draperies, and books — a girl's daintily bound books, selected and 
 purchased by herself — in every available corner ; a neat cottage 
 piano in a recess, a low easy-chair by the fire, with a five o'clock 
 tea-table in front of it ; desks, portfolios, work-baskets — all the 
 frivolities of a girl's life ; but everything arranged with a womanly 
 neatness which indicated industrious habits and a well-ordered 
 mind. No scattered sheets of music — no fancy-work pitch-and- 
 tossed about the room — no slovenliness claiming to be excused as 
 artistic disorder. 
 
 Christabel said her prayers, and read her accustomed portion 
 of Scripture, but not without some faint wrestlings with 
 Satan, who on this occasion took the shape of Angus Hamleigh. 
 Her mind was overcharged with wonder at this new phenomenon 
 in daily life, a man so entirely different from any of the men 
 she had ever met hitherto — so accomplished, so highly cultured ; 
 yet taking his accomplishments and culture as a thing of course, 
 as if all men were so. 
 
 She thought of him as she lay awake for the first hour of the 
 still night, watching the fire fade and die, and listening to the 
 long roll of the waves, hardly audible at Mount Eoyal amidst all 
 the common-place noises of day, but heard in the solemn silence 
 of night. She let her fancies shape a vision of her aunt's 
 vanished youth — that one brief bright dream of happiness, so 
 miserably broken ! — and wondered and wondered how it was 
 possible for any one to outlive such a grief. Still more incredible 
 did it seem that any one who had so loved and so lost could ever 
 listen to another lover ; and yet the thing had been done, and 
 Mrs. Tregonell's married life had been called happy. She always 
 spoke of the Squire as the best of men — was never weary of 
 praising him— loved to look up at his portrait on the wall — 
 
 f>reserved every unpicturesque memorial of his unpicturesque 
 ife — heavy gold and. silver snuff boxes, clumsy hunting crops, 
 spurs, guns, fishing-rods. The relics of his murderous pursuits 
 would have filled an arsenal. And how fondly she loved her 
 son who resembled that departed father — save in lacking some 
 of his best qualittw? How she doated on Leonard, the most
 
 32 Mount Boyal. 
 
 commonplace and unattractive of young men ! The thought of 
 her cousin set Christabel on a new train of speculation. If 
 Leonard had been at home when Mr. Hamleigh came to Mount 
 Boyal, how would they two have suited each other 1 Like fire 
 and water, like oil and vinegar, like the wolf and the lamb, like 
 any two creatures most antagonistic by nature. It was a happy 
 accident that Leonard was away. She was still thinking when 
 she fell asleep, with that uneasy sense of pain and trouble in 
 the future which was always suggested to her by Leonard's 
 image — a dim unshapen difficulty waiting for her somewhere 
 along the untrodden road of her life — a lion in the path. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ' TINTAGEL, HALF IN SEA, AND IIALF ON LAND.' 
 
 TrrEnE was no sense of fear or trouble of any kind in the mind of 
 anybody the next morning after breakfast, when Christabel, 
 Miss Bvidgeman, and Mr. Hamleigh started, in the young lady's 
 own particular pony carriage, for an exploring day, attended by 
 Handie, who was intensely excited, and furnished with a pic-nic 
 basket which made them independent of the inn at Trevena, and 
 afforded the opportunity of taking one's luncheon under 
 difficulties upon a windy height, rather than with the common- 
 place comforts of an hotel parlour, guarded against wind and 
 weather They were going to do an immense deal upon this first 
 day. Christabel, in her eagerness, wanted to exhibit all ber 
 lions at once. 
 
 ' Of course, you must see Tintagel,' she said ; ' everybody 
 who comes to this part of the world is in a tremendous hurry to 
 see King Arthur's castle. I have known people to set out in the 
 middle of tlu night.' 
 
 ' And have you ever known any one of them who was not 
 just a little disappointed with that stupendous monument of 
 traditional royalty '{ ' asked Miss Bridgeman, with her most 
 prosaic air. ' They expect so much — halls, and towers, and keep, 
 and chapel— and find only ruined walls, and the faint indication 
 of a grave-yard. King Arthur is a name to conjure with, and 
 Tintagel is like Mont Blanc or the Pryramids. It can never be 
 so grand as the vision its very name has evoked.' 
 
 ' I blush to say that I have thought very little about Tintagei 
 hitherto,' said Mr. Hamleigh ; ' it has not been an integral part 
 of my existence ; so my expectations are more reasonable than 
 those of the enthusiastic tourist. I promise to be delighted with 
 your ruins.'
 
 ' Tintagel, half in Sea, and half on Land.' 33 
 
 ' Oh, but you will pretend,' said Christabel, ' and that will be 
 hateful ! I would rather have to deal with one of those pro- 
 voking people who look about them blankly, and exclaim, -' Is this 
 all? " and who stand in the very centre of Arthur's Hall, and ask, 
 M And, pray, where is Tintagel ? — when are we to see the cajtle 1 " 
 No ! give me the man who can take in the grandeur of that wild 
 height at a glance, and whose fancy can build up those ruined 
 walls, re-create those vanished towers, fill the halls with knights 
 in shining armour, and lovely ladies — see Guinevere herself upon 
 her throne — clothed in white samite — mystic, wonderful ! ' 
 
 ' And with Lancelot in the background,' said Mr. Hamleigh. 
 ' I think the less we say about Guinevere the better, and your 
 snaky Vivien, and your senile Merlin, your prying Modred. 
 What a disreputable set these Round Table people seem to have 
 been altogether — they need have been dead thirteen hundred 
 years for us to admire them ! ' 
 
 They were driving along the avenue by this time, the stout 
 chestnut cob going gaily in the fresh morning air — Mr. Hamleigh 
 sitting face to face with Christabel as she drove. What a fair 
 face it was in the clea/ light of day 1 How pure and delicate 
 every tone, from the whiteness of the lily to the bloom of the 
 wild rose 1 How innocent the expression of the large liquid 
 eyes, which seemed to smile at him as he talked ! He had known 
 so many pretty women — his memory was like a gallery of beau- 
 tiful faces ; but he could recall no face so completely innocent, 
 so divinely young. ' It is the youthfulness of an unsullied 
 mind,' he said to himself; 'I have known plenty of girls as 
 young in years, but not one perfectly pure from the taint of 
 worldliness and vanity. The trail of the serpent was over 
 them all ! ' 
 
 They drove down hill into Boscastle, and then straightway 
 began to ascend still steeper hills upon the other side of the 
 harbour. 
 
 ' You ought to throw a viaduct across the valley,' said Mr. 
 Hamleigh — ' something like Brunei's bridge at Saltash ; but 
 perhaps you have hardly traffic enough to make it pay.' 
 
 They went winding up the new road to Trevena, avoiding 
 the village street, and leaving the Church of the Silent Tower 
 j on its windy height on their right hand. The wide Atlantic lay 
 far below them on the other side of those green fields which 
 bordered the road ; the air they breathed was keen with the 
 aoft breath of the sea. But autumn had hardly plucked a leaf 
 from the low storm-beaten trees, or a flower from the tall 
 hedgerows, where the red blossom of the Ragged Robin mixed 
 with the pale gold of the hawk-weed, and the fainter yellow of 
 the wild cistus. The ferns had hardly begun to wither, and 
 Angus Hamleigh, whose last experiences had been among th«
 
 34 Mount Royal. 
 
 stone walls of Aberdeenshire, wondered at the luxuriance 0/ 
 this western world, where the banks were built-up and fortified 
 with boulders of marble-veined spar. 
 
 They drove through the village of Trevalga, in which there 
 is never an inn or public-house of any kind — not even a cottage 
 licensed for the sale of beer. There was the wheelwright, car- 
 penter, builder, Jack-of-all-trades, with his shed and his yard — 
 the blacksmith, with his forge going merrily — village school — 
 steam threshing-machine at work — church — chapel ; but never 
 a drop of beer — and yet the people at Trevalga are healthy, and 
 industrious, and decently clad, and altogether comfortable 
 looking. 
 
 'Some day we will take you to call at the Rectory,' said 
 Christabel, pointing skywards with her whip. 
 
 'Do you mean that the Rector has gone to Heaven ?' asked 
 Angus, looking up into the distant blue; 'or is there any 
 earthly habitation higher than the road on which we are driving. 
 
 'Didn't you see the end of the lane, just now?' asked 
 Christabel, laughing ; ' it is rather steep — an uphill walk all the 
 way ; but the views are lovely.' 
 
 ' We will walk to the Rectory to-morrow,' said Miss Bridge- 
 man ; ' this lazy mode of transit must not be tolerated after 
 to-day.' 
 
 Even the drive to Trevena was not all idleness ; for after 
 they had passed the entrance to the path leading to the beauti- 
 ful waterfall of St. Nectan's Kieve, hard by St. Piran's chapel 
 and well — the former degraded to a barn, and the latter, once 
 of holy repute, now chiefly useful as a cool repository for butter 
 from the neighbouring dairy of Trethevy Farm — they came to 
 a hill, which had to be walked down ; to the lowest depth of 
 the Rocky Valley, where a stone bridge spans the rapid brawling 
 stream that leaps as a waterfall into the gorge at St. Nectan'a 
 Kieve, about a mile higher up the valley. And then they came 
 to a corresponding hill, which had to be walked up — because in 
 either case it was bad for the cob to have a weight behind him. 
 Indeed, the cob was so accustomed to consideration in this 
 matter, that he made a point of stopping politely for his people 
 »o alight at either end of anything exceDtional in the way of a 
 bill. 
 
 ' I'm afraid you spoil your pony,' said Mr. Hamleigh, throw- 
 ing the reins over his arm, and resigning himself to a duty, 
 which made him feel very much like a sea-side flyman earning 
 \is day's wages toilsomely, and saving his horse with a view to 
 future fares. 
 
 ' Better that than to spoil you,' answered Miss Bridgeman, 
 as she and Christabel walked briskly beside him. ' But if you 
 fasttra the reins to the dashboard, you may trust Felix.'
 
 * Tintagel, half in Sea, and half on Land.' 35 
 
 ' "Won't he run away 1 ' 
 
 ' Not he,' answered Christabel. ' He knows that he would 
 never be so happy with anybody else as he is with us.' 
 
 ' But mightn't he take a fancy for a short run ; just far 
 •nough to allow of his reducing that dainty little carriage to 
 match-wood ? A well-fed under-worked pony so thoroughly 
 enjoys that kind of thing.' 
 
 ' Felix has no such diabolical suggestions He is a conscien- 
 tious person, and knows his duty. Besides, he is not under- 
 worked. There is hardly a day that he does not carry us 
 somewhere.' 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh surrendered the reins, and Felix showed him- 
 self worthy of his mistress's confidence, following ■< t her heels 
 like a dog, with his honest brown eyes fixed on the slim tall 
 figure, as if it had been his guiding star. 
 
 ' I want you to admire the landscape,' said Christabel, when 
 they were on the crest of the last hill ; ' is not that a lovely 
 valley 1 ' 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh willingly admitted the fact. The beauty of 
 a pastoral landscape, with just enough of rugged wildness for 
 the picturesque, could go no further. 
 
 ' Creswick has immortalized yonder valley by his famous 
 picture of the mill,' said Miss Bridgeman, ' but the romantic 
 old mill of the picture has lately been replaced by that large 
 ungainly building, quite out of keeping with its surroundings.' 
 
 ' Have you ever been in Switzerland ? ' asked Angus of 
 Christabel, when they had stood for some moments in silent 
 contemplation of the landscape. 
 
 '' Xever.' 
 
 ' Nor in Italy ? ' 
 
 ' Xo. I have never been out of England. Since T was fiva 
 years old I have hardly spent a year of my life out of Cornwall.' 
 
 'Happy Cornwall, which can show so fair a product of its 
 soil ! Weli, Miss Courtenay, I know Italy and Switzerland by 
 i irt, and I like this Cornish landscape better than either. It 
 is not so beautiful — it would not do as well for a painter or a 
 poet; but it comes nearer an Englishman's heart. What can 
 one have better than the hills and the sea? Switzerland can 
 show you bigger hills, ghostly snow-shrouded pinnacles that rn ick 
 the eye, following each other like a line of phantoms, Losing 
 themselves in the infinite ; but Switzerland cannot, show you 
 that.' 
 
 I!.- p tinted to the Atlantic : the long undulating Lino of the 
 coast, rocky, rugged, yet verdant, with many a crave and pro- 
 montory, many a dip and rise. 
 
 ' It is the most everlasting kind of beauty, is it not ? ' asked 
 Christabel, delighted at this little gush of warm feeling in one
 
 36 Mount Boy:.}. 
 
 whose usual manner was so equable. 'One could never tire of 
 the sea. And I am always proud to remember that our sea is so 
 big — stretching away and away to the New .World. I should 
 have liked it still better before the days of Columbus, when it 
 led to the unknown ! ' 
 
 'Ah! 'sighed Angus, 'youth always yearns for the un« 
 discovered. Middle age knows that there is nothing worth dis- 
 covering ! ' 
 
 On the top of the hill they paused for a minute or so to con- 
 template the ancient Borough of Bossiney, which, until dis- 
 franchised in 1832, returned two members to Parliament, with 
 a constituency of little more than a dozen, and which once had 
 Sir Francis Drake for its representative. Here Mr. Hamleigh 
 beheld that modest mound called the Castle Hill, on the top of 
 which it was customary to read the writs before the elections. 
 
 An hour later they were eating their luncheon on that windy 
 height where once stood the castle of the great king. To 
 Christabel the whole story of Arthur and his knights was as real 
 as if it had been a part of her own life. She had Tennyson's 
 Arthur and Tennyson's Lancelot in her heart of hearts, and 
 knew just enough of Sir Thomas Mallory's prose to give sub- 
 stance to the Laureate's poetic shadows. Angus amused himself 
 a littie at her exppnse, as they ate their chicken and salad on the 
 grassy mounds which were supposed to be the graves of heroes 
 who died before At helstane drove the Cornish across the Tamar, 
 and made his victori us progress through the country, even to the 
 Scilly Isles, after defeating Howel, the last King of Cornwall. 
 
 ' Do you really think that gentlemanly creature in the Laureate's 
 spic — that most polished and perfect and most intensely modern 
 English gentleman, self-contained, considerate of others, always 
 the right man in the light place — is one whit like that half-naked 
 sixih century savage — the real Arthur — whose Court costume 
 was a coat of blue paint, and whose war-shriek was the yell of a 
 Bed Indian 1 What can be more futile than our setting up any 
 one Arthur, and bowing the knee before him, in the face of the 
 fact that Great Britain teems with monuments of Arthurs — 
 Arthur's Seat in Scotland, Arthur's Castle in Wales, Arthur's 
 Bound Table here, there, and everywhere ? Be sure that Arthur 
 — Ardheer — the highest chief — was a generic name for the princes 
 of those days, and that there were more Arthurs than ever there 
 were Caesars.' 
 
 'I don't believe one word y< say,' exclaimed Christabei, 
 indignantly ; 'there was only one Lrthur, the son of Uther and 
 Ygerne, who was born in the cast] that stood on this very cliff, 
 on the first night of the year, ;r irried away in secret by 
 Merlin, and reared in secret by Sir An ton's wife — the brave good 
 Arthur — the Christian king — who was killed at the battle of
 
 ' Tintagel, half in Sea, and half on Land.'' 37 
 
 Camlan, near Slaughter Bridge, and was buried at Glaston- 
 bury.' 
 
 'And embalmed by Tennyson. The Laureate invented 
 Arthur — he took out a patent for the Bound Table .snd his 
 invention is only a little less popular than that other pa'oduct of 
 the age, the sewing-machine. How many among modern tourists 
 would care about Tintagel if Tennyson had not revived ihe old 
 legend ? ' 
 
 The butler had put up a bottle of champagne *or Mr. 
 Eamleigh — the two ladies drinking nothing but ev^kling 
 water — and in this beverage he drank hail to the spirit of the 
 legendary prince. 
 
 ' I am ready to believe anything now you have me up 
 here,' he said, ' for I have a shrewd idea that without your help 
 I should never be able to get down again. I should live and die 
 on the top of this rocky promontory — sweltering in the summer 
 sun— buffeted by the winter winds — an unwilling Simeon 
 Stylites.' 
 
 ' Do you know that the very finest sheep in Cornwall are said 
 to be grown on that island,' said Miss Bridgeman gravely, point- 
 ing to the grassy top of the isolated crag in the foreground, wheron 
 once stood the donjon deep. ' 1 don't know why it should be 
 so, but it is a tradition.' 
 
 ' Among butchers ] ' said Angus. ' I suppose even butchers 
 have their traditions. And the poor sheep who are condemned 
 to exile on that lonely rock-— the St. Helena of their woolly race 
 — do they know that they are achieving a posthumous perfection 
 — that they are straining towards the ideal in butcher's meat 1 
 There is room for much thought in the question.' 
 
 ' The tide is out,' said Christabel, look seaward ; ' I think w 9 
 ought to do Trebarwith sands to-day.' 
 
 ' Is Trebarwith another of your lions 1 ' asked Angu3, 
 placidly. 
 
 ' Yes.' 
 
 ' Then, please save him for to-morrow. Let me drink the cup 
 of pleasure to the dregs where we are. This champagne has a 
 magical taste, like the philter which Tristan and Iseult were so 
 foolish as to drink while they sailed across from Ireland to this 
 Cornish shore. Don't be alarmed, Miss Bridgeman, [ am not 
 going to empty the bottle. I am not an educated tourist — have 
 read neither Black nor Murray, and I am very slow about taking 
 in ideas. Even after all you have told me, I am not clear in my 
 mind as to which is the castle and which the chapel, and which 
 the burial-ground. Let us finish the afternoon dawdling about 
 Tintagel. Let us see the sun set from this spot, where Arthur must 
 so often have watched it, if the men of thirteen hundred years 
 ago ever cared to ^atch the sun setting, which I doubt. They
 
 38 Mount Boyal. 
 
 belong to the night-time of the world, when civilization was dead 
 in Southern Europe, and was yet unborn in the West. Let us 
 dawdle about till it is time to drive back to Mount Royal, and 
 then I shall carry away an impression. I am very slow at taking 
 impressions.' 
 
 ' I think you want us to believe that you are stupid,' said 
 Christabel, laughing at the earnestness with which he pleaded. 
 
 ' Believe me, no. I should like you to think me ever so much 
 better than I am. Please let us dawdle.' 
 
 They dawdled accordingly. Strolling about upon the short sea- 
 beaten grass, so treacherous and slippery a surface in summer 
 time, when fierce Sol has been baking it. They stumbled against 
 the foundations of lon^-vanished walls, they speculated upon 
 fragments of cyclopean masonry, and talked a great deal about 
 the traditions of the spot. 
 
 Christabel, who had all the old authorities — Leland, Carew, 
 and Norden — at her fingers' ends, was delighted to expound the 
 departed glories of this British fortress. She showed where the 
 ancient dungeon keep had reared its stony walls upon that ' high 
 terrible crag, environed with the sea ; and how there had once 
 been a drawbridge uniting yonder cliff with the buildings on the 
 mainland ' — how divorced, as Carew says, ' by the downfallen 
 steep cliffs, on the farther side, which, though it shut out the sea 
 from his wonted recourse, hath yet more strengthened the island ; 
 for in passing thither you must first descend witli a dangerous' 
 declining, and then make a worse ascent by a path, through his 
 Btickleness occasioning, and through his steepness threatening, the 
 ruin of your life, with the falling of your foot.' She told Mr. 
 Hamleigh hew, after the Conquest, the castle was the occasional 
 residence of some of our Princes, and how Richard King of the 
 Romans, Earl of Cornwall, son of King John, entertained here 
 his nephew David, Prince of Wales, how, in Richard the Second's 
 tune, this stronghold was made a State prison, and how a certain 
 Lord Mayor of London was, for his unruly mayoralty, con- 
 demned thither as a perpetual penitentiary ; which seems very 
 hard upon the chief magistrate of the city, who thus did vicarious 
 penance for the riot of his brief reign. 
 
 And then they talked of Tristan and Iseult, and the tender 
 old love-story, which lends the glamour of old-world fancies to 
 those bare ruins of a traditional past. Christabel knew the old 
 chronicle through Matthew Arnold's poetical version, which 
 fjives only the purer and better side of the character of the 
 Knight and Chatelaine, at the expense of some of the strongest 
 features of the story. Who, that knew that romantic legend, 
 could linger on that spot without thinking of King Marc's faith- 
 less queen ! Assuredly not Mr. Hamleigh, who was a staunch 
 believer in the inventor of ( sweetness aoid light/ and who knew 
 Arnold a vursea by haurt. r
 
 'Tintagel, half in Sea, and half on Land* 39 
 
 'What have they done with the flowers and the terrace 
 walks ? ' he said, — ' the garden where Tristan and his Queen 
 basked in the sunshine of their days ; and where they parted for 
 ever? — 
 
 • " All the spring time of their love 
 
 Is already gone and past, 
 
 And instead thereof is seen 
 
 Its winter, which endureth still — 
 
 Tyntagel, on its surge-beat hill, 
 
 The pleasaunce walks, the weeping queen, 
 
 The flying leaves, the straining blast, 
 
 And that long wild kiss — their last." 
 
 And where — oh, where — are those graves in the King's chapel in 
 which the tyrant Marc, touched with pity, ordered the fated 
 lovers to be buried 1 And, behold ! out of the grave of Tristan 
 there sprung a plant which went along the walls, and descended 
 into the gra^e of the Queen, and though King Marc three several 
 times ordered this magical creeper to be cut off root and branch, 
 it was always found growing again next morning, as if it were 
 the very spirit of the dead knight struggling to get free from the 
 grave, and to be with his lady-love again ! Show me those 
 tombs, Miss Courtenay.' 
 
 ' You can take your choice,' said Jessie Biidgeman, pointing 
 to a green mound or two, overgrown with long rank grass, in 
 that part of the hill which was said to be the kingly burial-place. 
 ' But as for your magical tree, there is not so much as a bramble 
 to do duty for poor Tristan.' 
 
 ' If I were Duke of Cornwall and Lord of Tintagel Castle, 
 I would put up a granite cross in memory of the lovers ; though 
 J! fear there was very little Christianity in either of them,' said 
 Angus. 
 
 ' And I would come once a year and hang a garland on it,' 
 said Christabel, smiling at him with 
 
 ' Eyes of deep, soft, lucent hue — 
 Eyes too expressive to be blue, 
 Too lovely to be grey.' 
 
 He had recalled those lines more than once when he looked 
 into Christabel's eyes. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh had read so much as to make him an interest- 
 ing talker upon any subject ; but Christabel and Jessie noticed 
 that of his own life, his ways and amusements, his friends, his 
 surroundings, he spoke hardly at all. Tliis fact Christabel 
 noticed with wonder, Jessie with suspicion. If a man led a 
 good wholesome life, he would surely be more frank and open — 
 he would surely have more to say about himself and his 
 associates.
 
 8 Mount Royal. 
 
 They dawdled, and dawdled, till past four o'clock, and to 
 none of the three did the hours so spent seem long ; but they 
 found that it would make them too late in their return to Mount 
 Royal were they to wait for sundown before they turned their 
 faces homewards ; so while the day was still bright, Mr. Ham- 
 leigh consented to be guided by steep and perilous paths to the 
 base of the rocky citadel, and then they strolled back to the 
 Wharncliffe Arms, where Felix had been enjoying himself in 
 the stable, and was now desperately anxiousr^to get home, 
 rattling up and down hill at an alarming rate, and not hinting 
 at anybody's alighting to walk. 
 
 This was only one of many days spent in the same fashion. 
 They walked next day to Trebarwith sands, up and down hills, 
 which Mr. Hamleigh declared were steeper than anything he had 
 ever seen in Switzerland ; but he survived the walk, and his 
 spirits seemed to rise with the exertion. This time Major Bree 
 went with them — a capital companion for a country ramble, 
 beicg just enough of a botanist, archaeologist, and geologist, to 
 leaven the lump of other people's ignorance, without being 
 obnoxiously scientific. Mr. Hamleigh was delighted with that 
 noble stretch of level sand, with the long rollers of the Atlantic 
 tumbling in across the low rocks, and the bold headlands behind — 
 spot beloved of marine painters — spot where the gulls and the shags 
 hold their revels, and where man feels himself but a poor creature 
 face to face with the lonely grandeur of sea, and cliff, and sky. 
 
 So rarely is that long stretch of yellow sand vulgarized by 
 the feet of earth's multitudes, that one-half expects to see a 
 procession of frolicsome sea-nymphs come dancing out of yonder 
 cave, and wind in circling measures towards the crested wave- 
 lets, gliding in so softly under the calm clear day. 
 
 These were halcyon days — an Indian summer — balmy 
 western zephyrs — sunny noontides — splendid sunsets — altogether 
 the most beautiful autumn season that Angus Hamleigh had 
 known, or at least, so it seemed to him — nay, even more than 
 this, surely the most beautiful season of his life. 
 
 As the days went on, and day after day was spent in Chris- 
 tabel's company — almost as it were alone with her, for Miss 
 Bridgeman and Major Bree were but as figures in the back- 
 ground — Angus felt as if he were at the beginning of a new life 
 — a life filled with fresh interests, thoughts, hopes, desires, 
 unknown and undreamed of in the former stages of his being. 
 Never before had he lived a life so uneventful — never before 
 had he been so happy. It surprised him to discover how 
 simple are the elements of real content — how deep the charm of 
 a placid existence among thoroughly loveable people ! Chris- 
 tabel Courtenay was not the loveliest woman he had ever 
 known, nor the most elegant, nor the most accomplished,
 
 • Tintagel, half in Sea, and half on Land. 41 
 
 nor the most fascinating ! but she was entirely different from 
 all other women with whom his lot had been cast. Her innocence, 
 her unsophisticated enjoyment of all earth's purest joys, 
 her transparent purity, her perfect trustfulness — these were 
 to him as a revelation of a new order of beings. If he had 
 been told of such a woman he would have shrugged his 
 shoulders misbelievingly, or would have declared that she must 
 be an idiot. But Christabel was quite as clever as those 
 brilliant creatures whose easy manners had enchanted him in 
 days gone by. She was better educated than many a woman he 
 knew who passed for a wit of the first order. She had read 
 more, thought more, was more sympathetic, more companionable, 
 and she was delightfully free from self -consciousness or vanity. 
 
 He found himself talking to Christabel as he had never 
 talked to anyone else since those early days at the University, 
 the bright dawn of manhood, when he confided freely in that 
 second self, the chosen friend of the hour, and believed that all 
 men lived and moved according to his own boyish standard of 
 honour. He talked to her, not of the actualities of his life, but 
 of his thoughts and feelings — his dreamy speculations upon the 
 gravest problems which hedge round the secret of man's final 
 destiny. He talked freely of his doubts and difficult! s, and the 
 half-belief which came so near unbelief— the wide love of all 
 creation — the vague yet passionate yearning for immortality 
 which fell so far short of the Gospel's sublime certainty. He 
 revealed to her all the complexities of a many-sided mind, and 
 she never failed him in sympathy and understanding. This 
 was in their graver moodi,, when by some accidental turn of the 
 conversation they fell into the discussion of those solemn 
 questions which are always at the bottom of every man and 
 toman's thoughts, like the unknown depths of a dark water- 
 pool. For the most part their talk was bright and light as 
 those sunny autumn days, varied as the glorious and ever- 
 changing hues of sky and sea at sunset. Jessie was a delightful 
 companion. She was so thoroughly easy herself that it was 
 impossible to feel ill at ease with her. She played her part of 
 confidante so pleasantly, seeming to think it the most natural 
 thing in the world that those two should be absorbed in each 
 other, and should occasionally lapse into complete forgetfulness 
 of her existence. Major Bree when he joined in their rambles 
 was obviously devoted to Jessie Bridgemin. It was her neatly 
 gloved little hand which he was eager to clasp at the crossing 
 of a stile, and where the steepness of the hill-side path gave 
 him an excuse for assisting her. It was her stout little boot 
 which he guided so tenderly, where the ways were ruggedest, 
 Never had a plain woman a more respectful admirer — never 
 was beauty in her peerhss zenith more devoutly woishipped 1
 
 42 Mount Royal. 
 
 And so the autumn days sped by, pleasantly for all : with 
 
 deepest joy — joy ever waxing, never waning — for those two who 
 had found the secret of perfect sympathy in thought and feeling. 
 It was not for Angus Hamleigh the first passion of a spotless 
 manhood ; and yet the glamour and the delight were as new 
 as if he had never loved before. He had never so purely, sc 
 reverently loved. The passion was of a new quality. It 
 seemed to him as if he had ascended into a higher sphere in the 
 universe, and had given his heart to a creature of a loftier race. 
 
 ' Perhaps it is the good old lineage which makes the differ- 
 ence,' he said to himself once, while his feelings were still suffi- 
 ciently novel and so far under his control as to be subject to 
 analysis. ' The women I have cared for in days gone by have 
 hardly got over their early affinity with the gutter ; or when I 
 have admired a woman of good family she ha9 been steeped to 
 the lips in worldliness and vanity.' 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh, who had told himself that he was going to be 
 intensely bored at Mount Eoyal, had been Mrs. Tregonell's guest 
 for three weeks, and it seemed to him as if the time were brief 
 and beautiful as one of those rare dreams of impossible bliss 
 which haunt our waking memories, and make actual life dull and 
 joyless by contrast with the glory of shadowland. No word had 
 yet been spoken — nay, at the very thought of those words which 
 most lovers in his position would have been eager to speak, his 
 soul sickened and his cheek paled ; for there would be no joyful- 
 ness in the revelation of his love — indeed, he doubted whether he 
 had the right to reveal it — whether duty and honour did not 
 alike constrain him to keep his converse within the strict limits 
 of friendship, to bid Christabel good-bye, and turn his back upon 
 Mount Royal, without having said one word more than a friend 
 might speak. Happy as Christabel had been with him — tenderly 
 as she loved him — she was far too innocent to have considered 
 herself ill-treated in such a case. She would have blamed herself 
 alone for the weakness of mind which had been unable to resist 
 the fascination of his society— she would have blushed and wept 
 in secret for her folly in having loved unwooed. 
 
 ' Has the eventful question been asked 1 ' Jessie inquired one 
 night, as Christabel lingered, after her wont, by the fire in Miss 
 Bridgeman's bedroom. 'You two were so intensely earnest to- 
 day as you walked ahead of the Major and me, that I said to my- 
 self, " now is the time — the crisis lias arrived ? " ' 
 
 ' There was no crisis,' answered Christabel, crimsoning ; ' he 
 has never said one word to me that can imply that I am any more 
 to him than the most indifferent acquaintance.' 
 
 ' "What need of words when every look and tone cries ' I love 
 you ? ' "Why he idolizes you, and he lets all the world see it. I 
 hope it may be well for you— both.'
 
 Tin tag el, half in Sea, and half on Land.' 43 
 
 
 Christabel was on her knees by the Ore. She laid ! pi 
 against Jessie's -waistband, and drew Jessie's arm lound her 
 neck, holding her hand lo/ingly. 
 
 1 Do you really think he — cares for me ? ' she faltered, with 
 ner face hidden. 
 
 ' Do I really tlmik that I have two eyes, and something which 
 is at least an apology for a nose!' ejaculated Jessie, contemptu- 
 ously. ' Why, it has been patent to eveiybody for the last 
 fortnight that you two are over head and ears in love with each 
 other. There never was a more obvious case of mutual infatua- 
 tion.' 
 
 ' Oh, Jessie ! surely I have not betrayed myself. 1 know 
 that I have been very weak — but I have tried so hard to hide 
 
 ' And have been about as successful as the ostrich. While 
 those drooping lashes have been lowered to hide the love-light in 
 your eyes, your whole countenance has been an illuminated 
 calendar of your folly. Poor Belle! to think that she has not 
 betrayed herself, while all Boscastle is on tiptoe to know when 
 the wedding is to take place. Why the parson could not see you 
 two sitting in the same pew without knowing that he woidd be 
 reading your banns before he was many Sundays older.' 
 
 'And you — really — like him l ' faltered Christabel, more 
 shyly than before. 
 
 ' Yes,' answered Jessie, with a provoking lack of enthusiasm. 
 ' I really like him. I can't help feeling sorry for Mrs. Tregonell, 
 for I know she wanted you to marry Leonard.' 
 
 Christabel gave a little sigh, and a faint shiver. 
 
 ' Poor dear Leonard ! I wonder what traveller's hardships he 
 is enduring while we are so snug and happy at Mount Loyal I ' 
 she said, kindly. ' He has an excellent heart : 
 
 'Troublesome people always have, 1 believe,' interjected 
 Jessie. ' It is their redeeming feature, the existence of which no 
 one can absolutely disprove.' 
 
 ' And I am very much attached to him — as a cousin — or as an 
 adopted brother ; but as to our ever being married — that is quite 
 out of the question. There never were two people less suited to 
 each other.' 
 
 ' Those are the people who usually come together,' said 
 Jessie ; ' the Divorce Court could hardly be kept going if it w :re 
 not so.' 
 
 ' Jessie, if you are going to be cynical I shall say good-night. 
 I hope there is no foundation for what you said just now. I 
 hope that Auntie has no foolish idea about Leonard and me.' 
 
 ' She has — or had — one prevailing idea, and I fear it will go 
 bard with her when she has to relinquish it,' answered Jessie, 
 seriously. ' I know that it has been her dearest hope to see
 
 44 Mount Eoyai. 
 
 you and Leonard married, and I should be a wretch if I were 
 not sorry for her disappointment, when she has been so good to 
 me. But she never ought to have invited Mr. Hamleigh to 
 Mount Royal. That is one of those mistakes, the consequences 
 of which last for a lifetime.' 
 
 ' I hope he likes me — just a little,' pursued Christabel, with 
 dreamy eyes fixed on the low wood fire ; ' but sometimes I fancy 
 there must be some mistake — that he does not really care a 
 straw for me. More than once, when he has began to say some- 
 thing that sounded ' 
 
 ' Business-like,' suggested Jessie, as the girl hesitated. 
 
 ' He has drawn back — seeming almost anxious to recall his 
 words. Once he told me — quite seriously — that he had made up 
 his mind never to marry. Now, that doesn't sound as if he 
 meant to marry me.' 
 
 ' That is not an uncommon way of breaking ground,' answered 
 Jessie, with her matter-of-fact air. ' A man tells a girl that he 
 is going to die a bachelor — which makes it seem quite a favour 
 on his part when he proposes. All women sigh for the unattain- 
 able ; and a man who distinctly states that he is not in the 
 market, is likely to make a better bargain when he surrenders.' 
 
 ' I should be sorry to think Mr. Hamleigh capable of such 
 petty ideas,' said Christabel. ' He told me once that he was like 
 Achilles. Why should he be like Achilles ? He is not a 
 soldier.' 
 
 ' Perhaps, it is because he has a Grecian nose,' suggested 
 Miss Bridgeman. 
 
 o v 
 
 'How can you imagine him so vain and foolish,' cried 
 Christabel, deeply offended. 'I begin to think you detest 
 him!' 
 
 4 No, ! Belle, I think him charming, only too charming, and I had 
 rather the man you loved were made of sterner metal — not such a 
 man as Leonard, whose loftiest desires are centred in stable and 
 gun-room ; but a man of an altogether different type from Mr. 
 Hamleigh. He has too much of the artistic temperament, without 
 being an artist — he is too versatile, too soft-hearted and im- 
 pressionable. I am afraid for you, Christabel, I am afraid ; and 
 if it were not too late — if your heart were not wholly given to 
 him ' 
 
 ' It is,' answered Christabel, tearfully, with her face hidden ; 
 1 I hate myself for being so foolish, but I have let myself Jove 
 him. I know that I may never be his wife — I do not even 
 think that he has any idea of marrying me — but I shall never 
 marry any other man. Oh, Jessie ! for pity's sake don't betray 
 me ; never let my aunt, or any one else in this world, learn what 
 I have told you. I can't help trusting you — you wind yourself 
 into my heart somehow, and find out all that is hidden there ! '
 
 'Love ! Thou art leading Me from Wintry Gold.' 45 
 
 1 Because I love you truly and honestly, my dear,' answered 
 Jessie, tenderly ; ' and now, good-night ; I feel sure that Mr. 
 Hamleigh will ask you to be his wife, and I only wish he were a 
 better man.' 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 'LOVE ! THOU ART LEADING ME FROM WINTRT COLD.' 
 
 After this came two or three dull and showery days, which 
 afforded no opportunity for long excursions or ramblings of 
 any kind. It was only during such rambles that Mr. Hamleigh 
 and Miss Courteuay ever found themselves alone. Mrs. 
 Tre^onell's ideas of propriety were of the old-fashioned school, 
 and°when her niece was not under her own wing, she expected 
 Miss Bridfenian to perform all the duties of a duenna — in no 
 wise suspecting how very loosely her instructions upon this point 
 were being carried out. At Mount Boyal there was no possibility 
 of confidential talk between Angus and Christabel. If they were 
 iu the drawing-room or library, Mrs. Tregonell was with them ; 
 if they played billiards, Miss Bridgeman was told off to mark for 
 them ; if they went for a constitutional walk between the showers, 
 or wasted half-an-hour in the stables looking at horses and dogs, 
 Miss Bridgeman was bidden to accompany them ; and though 
 they had arrived at the point of minding her very little, and 
 being sentimental and sympathetic under her very nose, still 
 there are limits to the love-making that can be carried on before 
 a third person, and a man would hardly care to propose in 
 the presence of a witness. So for three days Christabel still 
 remained in doubt as to Mr. Hamleigh's real feelings. That 
 manner of making tender little speeches, and then, as it were, 
 recalling them, was noticeable many times during those three 
 days of domesticity. There was a hesitancy— an uncertainty in 
 his attentions to Christabel which Jessie interpreted ill. 
 
 ' There is some entanglement, I daresay,' she told herself ; ' it 
 is the evil of his past life which holds him in the toils. How do we 
 know that he has not a wife hidden away somewhere 1 He ought 
 to declare himself, or he ought to go away ! If this kind of shilly- 
 shallying goes on much longer he will break Christabel's heart.' 
 
 Miss Bridgeman was determined that, if it were in her power 
 to hasten the crisis, the crisis should be hastened. The proprie- 
 ties, as observed by Mrs. Tregonell, might keep matters in 
 abeyance till Christmas. Mr. Hamleigh gave no hint of hi3 
 «l<tpartur<4. He might stay at Mount Royal for months scnti-
 
 46 Mount Royal. 
 
 mentalizing with Christabel, and ride off at tlie last uncom- 
 promised. 
 
 The fourth day was the feast of St. Luke. The weather had 
 brightened considerably, but there was a high wind — a south- 
 west wind, with occasional showers, 
 
 'Of course, you are going to church this morning,' said Jessie 
 to Christabel, as they rose from the breakfast-table. 
 
 ' Church this morning ? ' repeated Christabel, vaguely. 
 
 For the first time since she had been old enough to understand 
 tlu; services of her church, she had forgotten a Saint's Day. 
 
 ' It is St. Lake's Day. 5 
 
 'Yes, I remember. And the service is at Minster. "We can 
 walk across the hills.' 
 
 ' May I go with you ? ' asked Mr. Hamleigh. 
 
 'Do you like week-day services?' inquired Jessie, with 
 rather a mischievous sparkle in her keen grey eyes. 
 
 ' I adore them,' answered Angus, who had not been inside a 
 church on a week-day since he was best man at a friend's 
 wedding. 
 
 ' Then we will all go together,' said Jessie. ' May Brook 
 bring the pony-carriage to fetch us home, Mrs. Tregonell I I 
 have an idea that Mr. Hamleigh won't be equal to the walk 
 home.' 
 
 ' More than equal to twenty such walks ! ' answered Angus, 
 gaily. 'You under-estimate the severity of the training to 
 which I have submitted myself during the last three weeks.' 
 
 ' The pony-carriage may as well meet you in any case,' said 
 Mrs. Tregonell. And the order was straightway given. 
 
 They started at ten o'clock, giving themselves ample leisure 
 for a walk of something over two miles — a walk by lull and 
 valley, and rushing stream, and picturesque wooden bridge — 
 through a deep gorge where the dark-red cattle were grouped 
 against a background of gorse and heather — a walk of which one 
 could never grow weary — so lonely, so beautiful, so perfect a 
 blending of all that is wildest and all that is most gracious in 
 Nature — an Alpine ramble on a small scale. 
 
 Minster Church lies in a hollow of the hill, so shut in by 
 the wooded ridge which shelters its grey walls, that the stranger 
 comes upon it as an architectural surprise. 
 
 ' How is it you have never managed to finish your tower? ' 
 asked Mr. Hamleigh, surveying the rustic fane with a critical 
 air, as he descended to the churchyard by some rugged stone 
 steps on the si;le of the grassy hill. ' You cannot be a particularly 
 devout people, or you would hardly have allowed your parish 
 church to remain in this stunted and stinted condition.' 
 
 "'There was a tower once,' said Christabel, naively; 'the 
 stonsu are still in the churchyard ; but the monks used to bura
 
 'Love! Thou an leading Me from Wintry Cold.' 47 
 
 a light in the tower window — a light that shone through a cleft 
 in the hills, and was seen far out at sea.' 
 
 ' I believe that is geographically — or geometrically impossible,' 
 said Angus laughing ; ' but. pray go on.' 
 
 ' The light was often mistaken for a beacon, and the sliip3 
 came ashore and were wrecked on the rocks.' 
 
 'Naturally— and no doubt the monks improved the occasion. 
 Why should a Cornish monk be better than his countrymen? 
 " One and all " is your motto.' 
 
 ' They were not Cornish monks,' answered Christabel, ' but a 
 brotherhood of French monks from the monastery of St. Sergius, 
 at Angers. They were established in a Priory here by William 
 de Bottreaux, in the reign of Richard, Coeur de Lion ; and, 
 according to tradition, the townspeople resented their having 
 built the church so far from the town. I feel sure the monks could 
 have had no evil intention in burning a light ; but ,one night a 
 crew of wild sailors attacked the tower, and pulled the greater 
 part of it down.' 
 
 'And nobody in Boscastle has had public spirit enough to get 
 it set up again. Where is your respect for those early Christian 
 martyrs, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, to whose memory your 
 temple, is dedicated ? ' 
 
 4 1 don't suppose it was so much want of respect for the 
 martyrs as want of money,' suggested Miss Bridgeinan. ' We 
 have too many chapel people in Boscastle for our churches to be 
 enriched or beautified. But Minster is not a bad little church 
 after all.' 
 
 ' It is the dearest, sweetest, most innocent little church I ever 
 knelt in,' answered Angus ; and if I could but assist at one 
 particular service there ' 
 
 He checked himself with a sigh ; but this unfinished speech 
 amounted in Miss Bridgeman's mind to a declaration. She 
 stole a look at Christabel, whose fair face crimsoned for a 
 moment or so, only to grow more purely pale afterwards. 
 
 They went into the church, and joined devoutly in the brief 
 Saint's Day service. The congregation was not numerous. Two 
 or three village goodies— the school children — a tourist, who had 
 come to see the church, and found himself, as it were, entangled 
 in saintly meshes — the lady who played the harmonium, and 
 the incumbent who read prayers. These wei'e all, besides the 
 party from Mount Royal; There are plenty of people in 
 country parishes who will be as pious as you please on Sunday, 
 deeming three services not too much for their devotion, but who 
 can hardly be persuaded to turn out of the beaten track of 
 week-day life to offer homage to the memory of Evangelist or 
 Apostle. 
 
 The pony-carriage was waiting in the lane when Mr. TTam«
 
 49 Mount Eoyal. 
 
 h->h and \hd two ladies came out of the porch. Christabel and 
 the gentleman looked at the equipage doubtfully. 
 
 c You slandered me, Miss Bridgeman, by your suggestion that 
 I should be done up after a mile or so across the hills,' said Mr. 
 Hamleigh ; ' I never felt fresher in my life. Have you a hanker- 
 ing for the ribbons 1 ' to Christabel ; < or will you send your 
 pony back to his stable and walk home ? ' 
 ' I would ever so much rather walk.' 
 * And so would I.' 
 
 1 In that case, if you don't mind, I think I'll go home with 
 Felix,' said Jessie Bridgeman, most unexpectedly. 1 1 am not 
 feeling quite myself to-day, and the walk has tired me. You 
 won't mind going home alone with Mr. Hamleigh, will you, 
 Christabel 1 You might show him the seals in Pentargon Bay.' 
 
 What could Christabel do ? If there had been anything in 
 the way of an earthquake handy, she would have felt deeply 
 grateful for a sudden rift in the surface of the soil, which would 
 have allowed her to slip into the bosom of the hills, among the 
 inomes and the pixies. That Cornish coast was undermined 
 with caverns, yet there was not one for her to drop into. Again, 
 Jessie Bridgeman spoke in such an easy off-hand manner, as if 
 ifc were the most natural thing in the world for Christabel and 
 Mr. Hamleigh to be allowed a lonely ramble. To have refused, 
 ■ r even hesitated, would have seemed affectation, mock-modesty, 
 ■lf-consciousness. Yet Christabel almost involuntary made a 
 step towards the sarriage. 
 
 ' I think I had better drive,' she said ; ' Aunt Diana will be 
 wanting me.' 
 
 'No, she won't,' replied Jessie, resolutely. 'And you shall 
 not make a martyr of yourself for my sake. I know you love 
 that walk over the hill, and Mr. Hamleigh is dying to see 
 
 Pentargon Bay ' 
 
 ' Positively expiring by inches ; only it is one of those easy 
 deaths that does not hurt one very much,' said Angus, helping 
 Miss Bridgeman into her seat, giving her the reins, and arrang- 
 ing the rug over her knees with absolute tenderness. 
 
 ' Take care of Felix,' pleaded Christabel ; ' and if you trot 
 down the hills trot fast.' 
 
 ' I shall walk him every inch of the way. The responsibility 
 would be too terrible otherwise.' 
 
 But Felix had his own mind in the matter, and had no inten- 
 tion of walking when the way he went carried him towards bin 
 stable. So he trotted briskly up the lane, between tall, tangled 
 blackberry hedges, leaving Christabel and Angus standing at the 
 churchyard gate. The rest of the little congregation had dis- 
 persed ; the church door had been locked ; there was a grave- 
 digger at work in the garden-like churchyard, amidst long
 
 ' Love! Thou art leading Me from Wintry Cold.' 49 
 
 glasses and fallen leaves, and the unchanged ferns and mosses 
 of the bygone summer. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh had scarcely concealed his delight at Miss 
 Bridgeman's departure, yet, now that she was gone, he looked 
 passing sad. Never a word did he speak, as they two stood idly 
 at the gate, listening to the dull thud of the earth which the 
 gravedigger threw out of his shovel on to the grass, and the 
 shrill sweet song of a robin, piping to himself on a ragged thorn- 
 bush near at hand, as if in an ecstasy of gladness about things 
 in general. One sound so fraught with melancholy, the other so 
 full of joy ! The contrast struck sharply on Christabel's nerves, 
 to-day at their utmost tension, and brought sudden tears in her 
 eyes. 
 
 They stood for perhaps five minutes in this dreamy silence, 
 the robin piping all the while ; and then Mr. Hamleigh roused 
 himself, seemingly with an effort. 
 
 ' Are you going to show me the seals at Pentargon 1 ' he 
 asked, smilingly. 
 
 ' I don't know about seals — there is a local idea that seals are to 
 be seen playing about in the bay ; but one is not often so lucky as 
 to find them there. People have been very cruel in killing them, 
 and I'm afraid there are very few seals left on our coast now.' 
 
 'At any rate, you can show me Pentargon, if you are not 
 tired.' 
 
 ' Tired ! ' cried Christabel, laughing at such a ridiculous idea, 
 being a damsel to whom ten miles were less than three to a 
 town-bred young lady. Embarrassed though she felt by being 
 teft alone with Mr. Hamleigh, she could not even pretend that 
 the proposed walk was too much for her. 
 
 ' I shall be very glad to take you to Pentargon,' she said, 'it 
 is hardly a mile out of our way ; but I fear you'll be dis- 
 appointed ; there is really nothing particular to see.' 
 
 ' I shall not be disappointed — I shall be deeply grateful.' 
 They walked along the narrow hill-side paths, where it was 
 almost impossible for two to walk abreast ; yet Angus contrived 
 somehow to be at Christabel's side, guiding and guarding her by 
 ways which were so much more familiar to her than to him, that 
 there was a touch of humour in this pretence of protection. But 
 Christabel did not see things in their humorous aspect to-day 
 Her little hand trembled as it touched Angus Hamleigh's, when 
 he led her across a craggy bit of path, or over a tiny water-pool. 
 At the stiles in the valley on the other side of the bridge, which 
 are civilized stiles, and by no means difficult, Christabel was too 
 quick and light of foot to give any opportunity for that assist- 
 ance which her companion was so eager to afford. And now 
 they were in the depths of the valley, and had to mount another 
 hillj on the road to Bude, till they came to a field-gate 3 abuvo 
 
 K
 
 ; o Mount Royal. 
 
 which appeared a sign-board, and the mystic words, ' To Pen- 
 targon.' 
 
 ' What is Pentargon, that they put up its name in such big 
 letters 1 ' asked Mr. Hamleigh, staring at the board. ' Is it a 
 borough town — or a cattle market — or a cathedral city — or what 1 
 Them seem tremendously proud of it.' 
 
 ' It is nothing — or only a shallow bay, with a waterfall and a 
 wonderful cave, which I am always longing to explore. I believe 
 it is nearly as beautiful as the cavern in Shelley's " Alastor." But 
 you will see what Pentargon is like in less than five minutes.' 
 
 They crossed a ploughed field, and then, by a big five-barred 
 gate, entered the magic region which was said to be the paradise 
 of seals. A narrow walk cut in & steep and rocky bank, where 
 the gorse and heather grew luxuriantly above slate and spar, 
 described a shallow semicircle round one of the loveliest bays in 
 the world — a spot so exquisitely tranquil in this calm autumn 
 weather, so guarded and fenced in by the massive headlands that 
 jutted out towards the main — a peaceful haven, seemingly so re- 
 mote from that outer world to which belonged yonder white- 
 \vinged ship on the verge of the blue — that Angus Hamleigh 
 exclaimed involuntarily, — 
 
 ' Here is peace ! Surely this must be a bay in that Lotus 
 land which Tennyson has painted for us ! ' 
 
 Hitherto their conversation had been desultory — mere frag- 
 mentary talk about the landscape and the loveliness of the 
 autumn day, with its clear bright sky and soft west wind. They 
 had been always in motion, and there had been a certain adven- 
 turousness in the way that seemed to give occupation to their 
 thoughts. But now Mr. Hamleigh came to a dead stop, and 
 stood looking at the rugged amphitheatre, and the low weedy 
 rocks washed smooth by the sea. 
 
 1 Would you mind sitting down for a few minutes V he asked ; 
 ' this Pentargon of yours is a lovely spot, and I don't want to 
 leave it instantly. I have a very slow appreciation of Nature. 
 It takes me a long time to grasp her beauties.' 
 
 Christabel seated herself on the bank which he had selected 
 for her accommodation, and Mr. Hamleigh placed himself a little 
 lower, almost at her feet, her face turned seaward, his half 
 towards her, as if that lily face, with its wild rose bloom, were 
 even lovelier than the sunlit ocean in all its variety of colour. 
 
 ' It is a delicious spot,' said Angus, ' I wonder whether Tristan 
 and Iseult ever came here ! I can fancy the queen stealing away 
 from the Court and Court foolery, and walking across tne sunlit 
 hills with her lover. It would be rather a long walk, and there 
 might be a difficulty about getting back in time for supper ; but 
 ob« can picture them wandering by flowery fields, or by the cliffs 
 above that everlasting sea, and coming here to vest and talk of
 
 ' Love ! Thau art leading Me from Wintry Cold.' SX 
 
 their sorrow and their love. Can you not fancy her as Matthew 
 Arnold paints her ? — 
 
 1 " Iiet her have her youth again — 
 Let her be as she was then ! 
 Let her have her proud dark eyes. 
 And her petulant, quick replies : 
 Let her sweep her dazzling hand, 
 With its gesture of command, 
 And shake back her raven hair 
 With the old imperious air." 
 
 I have an idea that the Hibernian Iseult must have been a tartar, 
 though Matthew Arnold glosses over her peccadilloes so pleasantly. 
 I wonder whether she had a strong brogue, and a sneakmg 
 fondness for usquebaugh.' 
 
 ' Please, don't make a joke of her,' pleaded Christabel ; 'she is 
 very real to me. I see her as a lovely lady — tall and royal- 
 looking, dressed in long robes of flow T ered silk, fringed with gold. 
 And Tristan ' 
 
 ' What of Tristan 1 Is his image as clear in your mind ? 
 Efow T do you depict the doomed knight, born to suffer and to sin, 
 destined to sorrow from the time of his forest-birth — motherless, 
 beset with enemies, consumed by hopeless passion. I hope you 
 feel sorry for Tristan V 
 
 ' Who could help being sorry for him V 
 
 ' Albeit he was a sinner 1 I assure you, in the old romance 
 which you have not read — which you would hardly care to read- 
 neither Tristan nor Iseult are spotless.' 
 
 ' I have never thought of their wrong-doing. Their fate was so 
 sad, and they loved each other so truly.' 
 
 ' And, again, you can believe, perhaps — you who are so 
 innocent aud confiding — that a man who has sinned may forsake 
 the old evil ways and lead a good life, until every stain of that 
 bygone sin is purified. You can believe, as the Greeks believed, 
 in atonement and purification.' 
 
 ' I believe, as I hope all Christians do, that repentance can 
 wash away sin.' 
 
 ' Even the accusing memory of wrong-doing, and make a 
 man's soul white and fair again ? That is a beautiful creed.' 
 
 'I think the Gospel gives us warrant for believing as much— 
 not as some of the Dissenters teach, that one effort of faith, an 
 hour of prayer and ejaculation, can transform a murderer into a 
 saint ; but that earnest, sustained regret for wrong-doing, and a 
 steady determination to live a better life ' 
 
 ' Yes — that is real repentance,' exclaimed Angus, interrupting 
 her. ' Common sense, even without Gospel light, tells one that 
 it must be good. Christabel — may I call you Christabel 1 — i»v-4
 
 52 Mount Royal. 
 
 for this one isolated half-hour of life — here in Pentargon Bay 1 
 You shall be Miss Courtenay directly we leave this spot.' 
 
 ' Call me what you please. I don't think it matters verj 
 much,' faltered Christabel, blushing deeply. 
 
 ' But it makes all the difference to me. Christabel, I can't 
 tell you how sweet it is to me just to pronounce your name. If — 
 if — I could call you by that name always, or by a name still 
 nearer and dearer. But you must judge. Give me half-an-hour 
 — lialf-an-hour of heartfelt earnest truth on my side, and pitying 
 patience on yours. Christabel, my past life has not been 
 what a stainless Christian would call a good life. I have 
 not been so bad as Tristan. I have violated no sacred charge — 
 betrayed no kinsman. I suppose I have been hardly worse than 
 the common run of young men, who have the means of leading 
 an utterly useless life. I have lived selfishly, unthinkingly- 
 caring for my own pleasure — with little thought of anything that 
 was to come afterwards, either on earth or in heaven. But all 
 that is past and done with. My wild oats are sown ; I have had 
 enough of youth and folly. "When I came to Cornwall the other 
 day I thought that I was on the threshold of middle age, and 
 that middle age could give me nothing but a few years of pain 
 and weariness. But — behold a miracle ! — you have given me 
 oack my youth — youth and hope, and a desire for length of days, 
 and a passionate yearning to lead a new, bright, stainless life. 
 You have done all this, Christabel. I love you as I never 
 thought it possible to love ! I believe in you as I never before 
 believed in woman — and yet — and yet ' 
 
 He paused, with a long heart-broken sigh, clasped the girl's 
 hand, which had been straying idly among the faded heather, and 
 pressed it to his lips. 
 
 ' And yet I dare not ask you to be my wife. Shall I tell you 
 why?' 
 
 'Yes, tell me,' she faltered, her cheeks deadly pale, hei 
 lowered eyelids heavy with tears. 
 
 ' I told you I was like Achilles, doomed to an early death. You 
 remember with what pathetic tendreness Thetis speaks of her son, 
 
 ' " Few years are thine, and not a lengthened term ; 
 At once to early death and sorrows doomed 
 Lcyond the lot of man I " 
 
 The Fates have spoken about me quite as plainly as ever the sea- 
 nymph foretold the doom of her son. He was given the choice 
 of length of days or glory, and he deemed fame better than long 
 life. But my life has been as inglorious as it must be brief. 
 Three months ago, one of the wisest of physicians pronounced 
 my doom. The hereditary malady which for the Uu t fifty years 
 has been the curse of my family shows itself by the clearest iudi-
 
 • Love ! Thou art leading Me from Wintry Cold* 53 
 
 cations iii my case. I could have told the doctor this just as well 
 as he told me ; but it is best to have official information. I may 
 die before I am a year older ; I may crawl on for the next teu 
 rears — a fragile hot-house plant, sent to winter under southern 
 Bkies.' 
 
 ' And you may recover, and be strong and well again! ' cried 
 Christabel, in a voice choked with sobs. She made no pretence 
 of hiding her pity or her love. ' Who can tell ? God is so good. 
 What prayer will He not grant us if we only believe in Him ? 
 Faith will remove mountains.' 
 
 ' I have never seen it done,' said Angus. ' I'm afraid that no 
 effort of faith in this degenerate age will give a man a new lung. 
 No, Christabel, there is no chance of long life for me. If hope — 
 if love could give length of days, my new hopes, bom of you — 
 my new love felt for you, might work that miracle. But I am 
 the child of my century : I only believe in the possible. And 
 knowing that my years are so few, and that during that poor 
 remnant of life I may be a chronic invalid, how can I — how dare 
 1 be so selfish as to ask any girl — young, fresh, and bright, with 
 all the joys of life untasted — to be the companion of my decline? 
 The better she loved me, the sadder would be her life — the 
 keener would be the anguish of watching my decay ! ' 
 
 'But it would be a life spent with you, her days would be 
 devoted to you ; if she really loved you, she would not hesitate,' 
 pursued Christabel, her hands clasped passionately, tears stream- 
 ing down her pale cheeks, for this moment to her was the 
 supreme crisis of fate. ' She would be unhappy, but there 
 would be sweetness even in her sorrow if she could believe that 
 she was a comfort to you ! ' 
 
 'Christabel, don't tempt me! Ah, im darling! you don't 
 know how selfish a man's love is, how swei; it would be to me to 
 snatch such bliss, even on the brink of V e dark gulf — on the 
 threshold of the eternal night, the eternal -silence! Consider what 
 you would take upon yourself — you who perhaps have never 
 known what sickness means — have never seen the horrors of 
 mortal disease.' 
 
 ' Yes, I have sat with some of our poor people when they 
 were dying. I have seen how painful disease is, how cruel 
 Nature seems, and how hard it is for a poor creature racked with 
 
 Cain to believe in God's beneficence ; but even then there has 
 een comfort in being able to help them and cheer them a little. 
 I have thought more of that than of the actual misery of the 
 scene.' 
 
 'But to give all your young life — all your days and thoughts and 
 hop '£ to a (loomed man ! Think of that, Christabel ! When you 
 are happy with him to see Death grinning behind his shoulder — 
 to watch that spectacle which is of all Nature's miseries the moist
 
 64 Mount Royal. 
 
 awful — the slow decay of human life — a man dying by inches— 
 not death, but dissolution ] If my malady were heart-disease, and 
 you knew that at some moment—undreamt of — unlooked for — 
 death would come, swift as an arrov from Hecate's bow, brief, 
 with no loathsome or revolting detail — ■ then I might say, " Let 
 us spend my remnant of life together." But consumption, you 
 cannot tell what a painful ending that is ! Poets and novelists 
 havs described it a3 a kind of euthanasia ; but the poetical 
 mind is rarely strong in scientific knowledge. I want you to 
 understand all the horror of a life spent with a chronic sufferer, 
 about whom the cleverest physician in London has made up his 
 mind.' 
 
 ' Answer me one question,' said Christabel, drying her tears, 
 and trying to steady her voice. ' Would your life be any happier 
 if we were together— till the end ? ' 
 
 ' Happier 'i It would be a life spent in Paradise. Pain and 
 sickness could hardly touch me with their stiDg.' 
 
 ' Then let me be your wife.' 
 
 ' Christabel, are you in earnest ? have you considered ? ' 
 
 ' I consider nothing, except that it may be in my power to 
 make your life a little happier than it would be without me. I 
 want only to be sure of that. If the doom were more dreadful 
 than it is — if there were but a few short months of life left for 
 you, I would ask you to let me share them ; I would ask to 
 nurse you and watch you in sickness. There would be no other 
 fate on earth so full of sweetness for me. Yes, even with death 
 and everlasting mourning waiting for me at the end.' 
 
 ' My Christabel, my beloved ! my angel, my comforter ! 1 
 begin to believe in miracles. I almost feel as if you could give 
 me length of years, as well as bliss beyond all thought or hope 
 of mine. Christabel, Christabel, God forgive me if I am asking 
 you to wed sorrow ; but you have made this hour of my life an 
 unspeakable ecstasy. Yet I will not take you quite at your 
 word, love. You shall have time to consider what you are going 
 to do — time to talk to your aunt.' 
 
 ' I want no time for consideration. I will be guided by no 
 one. I think God meant me to love you — and cure you.' 
 
 ' I will believe anything you say ; yes, even if you promise 
 me a new lung. God bless you, my beloved ! You belong to 
 those whom He does everlastingly bless, who are so angelic upon 
 this earth that they teach us to believe in heaven. My Chris- 
 tabel, my own ! I promised to call you Miss Courtenay when we 
 left Pentargon, but I suppose now you are to be Christabel for 
 the rest of my life ! ' 
 
 ' Yes, always.' 
 
 ' AM all this time we have not seen a single seal ! ' exclaimed 
 Ang is ; gaily.
 
 1 The Silver Answer rang, — " Not Death, but Love" ' 55 
 
 His delicate features were radiant with happiness. Who could 
 at such a moment remember death and doom ? All painful 
 words which need be said had been spoken. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 'tiie silver answer rang, — "not death, but love."' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell and her niece were alone together in the 
 Library half-an-hour before afternoon tea, when the autumn light 
 was just beginning to fade, and the autumn mist to rise ghost- 
 like from the narrow Little harbour of Boscastle. Miss Bridge- 
 man had contrived that it should be so, just as she had contrived 
 the visit to the seals that morning. 
 
 So Cbristabel, kneeling by her aunt's chair in the fire-glow, 
 just as she had knelt upon the night before Mr. Hamleigh's 
 coming, with faltering lips confessed her secret. 
 
 ' My dearest, I have known it for ever so long,' answered 
 Mrs. Tregonell, gravely, laying her slender hand, sparkling with 
 hereditary rings — never so gorgeous as the gems bought yester- 
 day—on the girl's sunny hair, ' I cannot say that I am glad. 
 No, Christabel, I am selfish enough to be sorry, for Leonard's 
 sake, that this should have happened. It was the dreain of my 
 life that you two should marry. 5 
 
 ' Dear aunt, we could never have cared for each other — as 
 lovers. We had been too much like brother and sister.' 
 
 ' Not too much for Leonard to love you, as I know he does. 
 He was too confident — too secure of his power to win you. And 
 I, his mother, have brought a rival here — a rival who has stolen 
 your love from my son.' 
 
 ' Don't speak of him bitterly, dearest. Remember he is the 
 Bon of the man you loved.' 
 
 1 But e at my son ! Leonard must always be first in my mind. 
 I like Angus Hamleigh. He is all that his father was — yes — it 
 is almost a painful likeness — painful to me, who loved and I 
 mourned his father. But I cannot help being sorry for Leonard.' 
 
 ' Leonard shall be my dear brother, always,' said Christabel ; 
 yet even while she spoke it occurred to her that Leonard was not 
 quite the kind of person to accept the fraternal position 
 pleasantly, or, indeed, any secondary character whatever in the 
 drama of Life. 
 
 ' And when are you to be married ? ' asked Mrs. Tregonell, 
 looking at the fire. 
 
 ' Oh, Auntie, do you suppose I have begun to think of that 
 yet awhile ? '
 
 58 Mount Boyal. 
 
 1 Be sure that he has, if you have not ! I hope he is not 
 going to be in a hurry. You were only nineteen last birthday. 
 
 ' I feel tremendously old,' said Christabel. ' We — we were 
 talking a little about the future, this afternoon, in the billiard- 
 room, and Angus talked about the wedding being at the 
 beginning of the new year. But I told him I was sure you 
 would not like that.' 
 
 ' No, indeed ! I must have time to get reconciled to my loss,' 
 answered the dowager, with her arm drawn caressingly round 
 Christabel's head, as the girl leaned against her aunt's chair. 
 ' What will this house seem to me without my daughter ? 
 Leonard far away, putting his life in peril for some foolish sport, 
 and you living — Heaven knows where ; for you would have to 
 study your husband's taste, not mine, in the matter.' 
 
 ' Why shouldn't we live near you 1 Mr. Hamleigh might buy 
 a place. There is generally something to be had if one watches 
 one's opportunity.' 
 
 ' Do you think he would care to sink his fortune, or any part 
 of it, in a Cornish estate, or to live amidst these wild hills 1 ' 
 
 1 He says he adores this place.' 
 
 ' He is in love, and would swear as much of a worse place. 
 No, Belle, I am not foolish enough to sujDpose that you and Mr. 
 Hamleigh are to settle for life at the end of the world. This 
 house shall be your home whenever you choose to occupy it ; 
 and I hope you will come and stay with me sometimes, for I 
 shall be very lonely without you.' 
 
 ' Dear Auntie, you know how I love you ; you know how 
 completely happy I have been with you — how impossible it is 
 that anj'thing can ever lessen my love.' 
 
 ' I believe that, dear girl ; but it is rarely nowadays that 
 Ruth follows Naomi. Our modern Ruths go where their lovers 
 go, and worship the same gods. But I don't want to be selfish 
 or unjust, dear. I will try to rejoice in your happiness. And if 
 Angus Hamleigh will only be a little patient ; if be will give 
 me time to grow used to the loss of you, he shall have you with 
 your adopted mother's blessing.' 
 
 ' He shall not have me without it,' said Christabel, looking 
 up at her aunt with steadfast eyes. 
 
 She had said no word of that early doom of which Angus had 
 told her. For worlds she could not have revealed that fatal 
 truth. She had tried to put away every thought of it while she 
 talked with her aunt. Angus had urged her beforehand to be 
 perfectly frank, to tell Mrs. Tregonell what a mere wreck of a 
 life it was which her lover offered her : but she had refused. 
 
 ' Let that be our secret,' she said, in her low, sweet voice. 
 1 We want no one's pity. We will bear our sorrow together. 
 And, oh, Angus ! my faith is so strong. God, who has made
 
 1 The Silver Answer rang,—** Not Death, but Love." ' 5? 
 
 me so happy by the gift of your love, will not take you from 
 uie. If — if your life is to be brief, mine Mill not be long.' 
 
 ' My dearest ! if the gods will it so, we will know no part- 
 ing, but be translated into some new kind of life together — a 
 modern Baucis and Philemon. I think it would be wiser — 
 better, to tell your aunt everything. But if you think other- 
 wise' 
 
 * I will tell her nothing, except that you love me. and that, 
 tvith her consent, I am going to be your wife ; ' and with this 
 jetermination Christabel had made her confession to her aunt. 
 
 The ice once broken, everybody reconciled herself or himself 
 to the new aspect of affairs at Mount Royal. In less than a 
 week it seemed the most natural tiling in life that Ansms and 
 Christabel should be engaged. There was no marked change in 
 their mode of life. They rambled upon the hills, and went 
 boating on fine mornings, exploring that wonderful coast where 
 the sea-bird. congregate, on rocky isles and fortresses rising sheer 
 out of the sea — in mighty caves, the very tradition whereof 
 sounds terrible — caves that seem to have no ending, but to burrow 
 into unknown, unexplored regions, towards the earth's centre. 
 
 "With Major Bree for their skipper, and a brace of sturdy 
 boatmen, Angus, Christabel, and Jessie Bridgeman spent several 
 mild October mornings on the sea — now towards Cambeak, anon 
 towards Trebarwith. Tintagel from the beach was infinitely 
 grander than Tintagel in its landward aspect. ' Here,' as Norden 
 says, was ' that rocky and winding way up the steep sea-cliff, 
 under which the sea-waves wallow, and so assail the foundation 
 of the isle, as may astonish an unstable brain to consider the 
 peril, for the least slip of the foot leads the whole body into the 
 devouring sea.' 
 
 To climb these perilous paths, to spring from rock to rock 
 upon the slippery beach, landing on some long green slimy slab 
 over which the sea washes, was Christabel's delight — and Mr. 
 Hamleigh showed no lack of agility or daring. His health had 
 improved marvellously in that invigorating air. Christabel, 
 not^ful of every change of hue in the beloved face, saw how 
 much more healthy a tinge cheek and brow had taken since Mr. 
 Hamleigh came to Mount Royal. He had no longer the exhausted 
 look or the languid air of a man who had untimely squandered 
 his stock of life and health. His eye had brightened — with no 
 hectic light, but with the clear sunshine of a mind at ease. He 
 was altered in every way for the better. 
 
 And now the autumn evenings were putting on a wintry air 
 — the lights were twinkling early in the Alpine street of Bos- 
 castle. The little harbour was dark at rive o'tlock. Mr. 
 Hamleigh had been nearly two months at Mount Royal, and he 
 told himself that it was time for leave-taking. Fain would I19
 
 58 Mount Royal. 
 
 have stayed on — stayed until that blissful morning when 
 Christabel and he might kneel, side by side, before the altar in 
 Minster Church, and be made one for ever — one in life and death 
 —in a union as perfect as that which was symbolized by the plant, 
 that grew out of Tristan's tomb and went down into the grave of 
 his mistress. 
 
 Unhappily, Mrs. Tregonell had made up her mind that her 
 niece should not be married until she was twenty years of age — 
 and Christabel's twentieth birthday would not arrive till the 
 following Midsummer. To a lover's impatience so long an 
 interval seemed an eternity ; but Mrs. Tregonell had been very 
 gracious in her ^consent to his betrothal, so he could not 
 disobey her. 
 
 ' Christabel has seen so little of the world,' said the dowager. 
 ' I should like to give her one season in London before she 
 marries — just to rub off a little of the rusticity.' 
 
 ' She is perfect — I would not have her changed for worlds,' 
 protested Angus. 
 
 ' Nor I. But she ought to know a little more of society 
 before she has to enter it as your wife. I don't think a London 
 season will spoil her — and it will please me to chaperon her — 
 though I have no doubt I shall seem rather an old-fashioned 
 chaperon.' 
 
 ' That is just possible,' said Angus, smiling, as he thought 
 how closely his divinity was guarded. ' The chaperons of the 
 present day are very easy-going people — or, perhaps I ought to 
 say, that the young ladies of the present day have a certain 
 Yankee go-a-headishness which very much lightens the chaperon's 
 responsibility. In point of fact, the London chaperon has 
 dwindled into a formula, and no doubt she will soon be improved 
 off the face of society.' 
 
 ' So much the worse for society,' answered the lady of the 
 old school. And then she continued, with a friendly air, — 
 
 ' I dare say you know that I have a house in Bolton Row. I 
 have not lived in it since my husband's death — but it is mine, 
 and I can have it made comfortable between this and the early 
 spring. I have been thinking that it would be better for you 
 and Christabel to be married in London. The law business 
 would be easier sei/tled— and you may have relations and friends 
 who would like to be at your wedding, yet who would hardly 
 care to come to Boscastle.' 
 
 ' It is a long way,' admitted Angus. ' And people are s* 
 inconsistent. They think nothing of going to the Engadine, yet 
 grumble consumedlyat a journey of a dozen hours in their native 
 land — as if England were not worth the exertion.' 
 
 for the 
 
 ' Then I think we are agreed that London is the best place 
 the wedding,' said Mrs. Tregonell.
 
 * The Silver Answer rang, — " Not Death, but Love." * 56 
 
 1 1 am perfectly content. But if you suggested Timbuctoo I 
 should be just as happy.' 
 
 This being settled, Mrs. Tregonell wrote at once to her agent, 
 with instructions to set the old house in Bolton Bow in order for 
 the season immediately after Easter, and Christabel and her 
 lover had to reconcile then' minds to the idea of a long dreary 
 winter of severance. 
 
 Miss Courtenay had grown curiously grave and thoughtful 
 since her engagement — a change which Jessie, who watched her 
 closely, observed with some surprise. It seemed as if she had 
 passed from girlhood into womanhood in the hour in which she 
 pledged herself to Angus Hamleigh. She had for ever done with 
 the thoughtless gaiety of youth that knows not care. She had 
 taken upon herself the burden of an anxious, self-sacrificing 
 yove. To no one had she spoken of her lover's precarious hold 
 upon life , but the thought of by how frail a tenure she held her 
 happiness was ever present with her. ' How can I be good 
 enough to him 1 — how can I do enough to make his life happy V 
 she thought, ' when it may be for so short a time.' 
 
 With this ever-present consciousness of a fatal future, went 
 the desire to make her lover forget his doom, and the ardent 
 hope that the sentence might be revoked — that the doom pro- 
 nounced by human judgment might yet be reversed. Indeed, 
 Angus had himself begun to make light of his malady. Who 
 could tell that the famous physician was not a false prophet, 
 after all ? The same dire announcement of untimely death had 
 been made to Leigh Hunt, who contrived somehow — not always 
 in the smoothest waters — to steer his frail bark into the haven 
 of old age. Angus spoke of this, hopefully, to Christabel, as 
 they loitered within the roofless crumbling walls of the ancient 
 oratory above St. Nectan's Kieve, one sunny November morn- 
 ing, Miss Bridgeman rambling on the crest of the hill, with the 
 blank sheep-dog, Bandie, under the polite fiction of blackberry 
 hunting, among hedges which had long been shorn of their last 
 berry, though the freshness of the lichens and ferns still lingered 
 in this sheltered nook. 
 
 ' Yes, I know that cruel doctor was mistaken ! ' said 
 Christabel, her lips quivering a little, her eyes wide and grave, 
 but tearless, as they gazed at her lover. ' I know it, I know 
 it!' 
 
 ' 1 know that I am twice as strong and well as I was when 
 he saw me,' answered Angus : ' you have worked as great a 
 miracle for me as ever was wrought at the grare of St. 
 Mertheriana in Minster Churchyard. You have mad< me happy ; 
 and what can cure a man better than perfect bliss ? But, oh, my 
 darling ! what is to become of me when I leave you, when 1 
 return to the beaten ways of London life, and, looking back at
 
 60 Mount Royal. 
 
 these delicious days, ask niyself if this sweet life with you is 
 act some dream which I have dreamed, and which can neves 
 come again ? ' 
 
 ' You will not think anything of the kind,' said Christabel, 
 with a pretty little air of authority which charmed him— as all 
 her looks and ways charmed him. ' You know that I am sober 
 reality, and that our lives are to be spent together. And you 
 re not going back to London — at least not to stop there. You 
 are going to the South of France.' 
 
 ' Indeed ? this is the first I have heard of any such intention.' 
 
 ' Did not that doctor say you were to winter in the South I ' 
 
 ' lie did. But I thought we had agreed to despise that 
 doctor 1 ' 
 
 ' We will despise him, yet be warned by him Why should 
 any one, who has liberty and plenty of money, spend his winter 
 in a smoky city, where the fog blinds and stifles him, and the 
 frost pinches him, and the damp makes him miserable, when he 
 can have blue skies, and sunshine and flowers, and ever so much 
 brighter stars, a few hundred miles away ? We are bound to 
 obey each other, are we not, Angus ? Is not that among out 
 marriage vows ? ' 
 
 ' I believe there is something about obedience — on the lady's 
 side — but I waive that technicality. I am prepared to become 
 an awful example of a henpecked husband. If you say I am to 
 go southwards, with the swallows, I will go — yea, verily, to 
 Algeria or Tunis, if you insist ; though I would rather be on 
 the Riviera, whence a telegram, with the single word ' Come ' 
 would bring me to your side in forty-eight hours.' 
 
 ' Yes, you will go to that lovely land on the shores of the 
 Mediterranean, and there you will be very careful of your 
 health, so that when we meet in London, after Easter, your 
 every look will gainsay that pitiless doctor. Will you do this, 
 for my sake, Angus 1 ' she pleaded, lovingly, nestling at his side, 
 as they stood together on a narrow path that wound down to 
 the entrance of the Kieve. They could hear the rush of the 
 waterfall in the deep green hollow below them, and the faint 
 flutter of loosely hanging leaves, stirred lightly by the light 
 wind, and far away the joyous bark of a sheep-dog. No human 
 voices, save their own, disturbed the autumnal stillness. 
 
 ' This, and much more, would I do to please you, love. 
 Indeed, if I am not to be here, I might just as well be in the 
 South ; nay, much better than in London, or Paris, both of 
 which cities I know by heart. But don't you think we could 
 make a compromise, and that I might spend the winter at Tor- 
 quay, running over to Mount Royal for a few days occasionally?' 
 
 ' No ; Torquay will not do, delightful as it would be to have 
 you ao near. I have been reading about the climate in the South
 
 In Society. 61 
 
 of Fiance, and I am sure, if you are careful, a winter there will 
 do yon worlds of good. Next year ' 
 
 ' Next year we can go there together, and you will take care 
 of me. Was that what you were going to say, Belle 1 ' 
 
 1 Something like that.' 
 
 ' Yes,' he said, slowly, after a thoughtful pause, ' 1 shall be 
 glad to be away from London, and all old associations. My 
 past life is a worthless husk that I have done with for ever.' 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 IN SOCIETY. 
 
 The Easter recess was over. Society had returned from its 
 brief holiday — its glimpse of budding hedges and primrose- 
 dotted banks, blue skies and blue violets, the snowy bloom of 
 orchards, the tender green of young cornfields. Society had 
 come back again, and was hard at the London treadmill — yawn- 
 ing at old operas, and damning new plays — sniggering at 
 crowded soirees — laying down the law, each man his particular 
 branch thereof, at carefully planned dinner parties — quarrelling 
 and making friends again — eating and drinking — spending 
 and wasting, and pretending to care very little about anything ; 
 for society is as salt that has lost its savour if it is not cynical 
 and affected. 
 
 But there was one dehutantc at least that season for whom 
 town pleasures had lost none of their freshness, for whom the 
 old operas were all melody, and the new plays all wit — who 
 admired everything with frankest wonder and enthusiasm, and 
 without a thought of Horace, or Pope, or Creech, or anybody, 
 except the lover who was alwaj 7 s at her side, and who shed the 
 rose-coloured light of happiness upon the commonest thing?!. 
 To sit in the Green Park on a mild April morning, to see the 
 guard turn out by St. James's Palace after breakfast, to loiter 
 away an hour or two at a picture gallery — was to be infinitely 
 happy. Neither opera nor play, dinner nor dance, race-course 
 doi flower-show, was needed to complete the sum of Chfistabel's 
 bliss when Angus Hamleigh was with her. 
 
 He had returned from Hyeres, quietest among the southern 
 towns, wonderfully improved in health and strength. Even 
 Mrs. Tregouell and Miss Bridgeman perceived the change iu 
 him. 
 
 ' I think you must have been very ill when you came \a 
 Mount Royal, Mr. Hamleigh/ said Jessie, one day. ' You look 
 ro much better now.'
 
 C2 Mount Boyal. 
 
 'My Life was empty then — it is full now, he answered 
 ' It is hope that keeps a man alive, and I had very little to hope 
 for when I went westward. How strange the road of life is \ 
 and how little a man knows what is waiting for him round 
 the corner ! ' 
 
 The house in Bolton Row was charming ; just large enough 
 to be convenient, just small enough to be snug. At the back, 
 the windows looked into Lord Somebody's garden — not quite 
 a tropical paradise — nay, even somewhat flavoured with bricks 
 and mortar — but still a garden, where, by sedulous art, the 
 gardeners kept alive ferns and flowers, and where trees, 
 warranted to resist smoke, put forth young leaves in the spring- 
 time, and only languished and sickened in untimely decay when 
 the London season was over, and their function as fashionable 
 trees had been fulfilled. 
 
 The house was furnished in a Georgian style, pleasant to 
 modern taste. The drawing-room was of the spindle-legged 
 order — satin-wood card tables ; groups of miniatures in oval 
 frames ; Japanese folding screen, behind which Belinda might 
 have played Bo-peep ; china jars, at whose fall Narcissa might 
 have inly suffered, while outwardly serene. The dining-room 
 was sombre and substantial. The bedrooms had been improved 
 by modern upholstery , for the sleeping apartments of our 
 ancestors leave ^ good deal to be desired. All the windows were 
 full of flowers — inside and out there was the perfume and 
 colour of many blossoms. The three drawing-rooms, growing 
 smaller to a diminishing point, like a practical lesson in perspec- 
 tive, were altogether charming. 
 
 Major Bree had escorted the ladies to London, and was their 
 constant guest, camping out in a bachelor lodging in Jermyn 
 Street, and coming across Piccadilly every day to eat his luncheon 
 in Bolton Bow, and to discuss the evening's engagements. 
 
 Long as he had been away from London, he acclimatized 
 himself very quickly — found out everything about everybody — 
 what singers were best, worth hearing— what plays were best 
 worth seeing — what actors should be praised — which pictures 
 should be looked at and talked about— what horses were likely to 
 win the notable races. He was a walking guide, a living hand- 
 book to fashionable London. 
 
 All Mrs. Tregonell's old friends — all the Cornish people who 
 came to London— called in Bolton Bow ; and at every house 
 where the lady and her niece visited there were new introductions, 
 whereby the widow's visiting list widened like a circle in the 
 water — and cards for dances and evening parties, afternoons and 
 dinners were super-abundant. Christabel wanted to see every- 
 thing. She had quite a country girl's taste, and cared much 
 for the theatre and the opera than to be dressed in a new gown,
 
 In Society. 63 
 
 And to be crushed in a crowd of other young women in new 
 gowns — or to sit still and be admired at a stately dinner. Nor 
 was she particularly interested in the leaders of fashion, their 
 .vays and manners — the newest professed or professional beauty — 
 the last social scandal. She wanted to see the great city of which 
 she had read in history — the Tower, the Savoy, Westminster 
 Hall, the Abbey, St. Paul's, the Temple— the London of Elizabeth, 
 the still older London of the Edwards and Henries, the house in 
 which Milton was born, the organ on which he played, the place 
 where Shakespeare's Theatre once stood, the old Inn whence 
 Chaucer's Pilgrims started on their journey. Even Dickens : a 
 London — the London of Pickwick and Winkle — the Saracen's 
 Head at which Mr. Squeers put up — had charms for her. 
 
 ' Is everything gone 1 ' ohe asked, piteously, after being told 
 how improvement had effaced the brick and mortar background 
 of English History. 
 
 Yet there still remained enough to fill her mind with solemn 
 thoughts of the past. She spent long hours in the Abbey, with 
 Angus and Jessie, looking at the monuments, and recalling the 
 lives and deeds of long vanished heroes and statesmen. The 
 Tower, and the old Inns of Court, were full of interest. Her 
 curiosity about old houses and streets was insatiable. 
 
 1 No one less than Macaulay could satisfy you,' said Angus, 
 one day, when his memory was at fault. 'A man of infinite 
 reading, and infallible memory.' 
 
 ' But you have read so much, and you remember a great deal.' 
 
 They had been prowling about the Whitehall end of the 
 town in the bright early morning, before Fashion had begun to 
 .stir herself faintly among her down pillows. Christabel loved 
 the parks and streets while the freshness of sunrise was still upor 
 them — and these early walks were an institution. 
 
 ' Where is the Decoy ? ' she asked Angus, one day, in St. 
 James's Park ; and on being interrogated, it appeared that she 
 meant a certain piece of water, described in ' Peveril of the Peak? 
 All this part of London was peopled with Scott's heroes and 
 heroines, or with suggestions of Goldsmith. Here Fenelia 
 danced before good-natured, loose-living Rowley. Here Nigel 
 stood aside, amidst the crowd, to see Charles, Prince of Wales, 
 and his ill-fated favourite, Buckingham, go by. Here the Citizen 
 of the World met Beau Tibbs and the gentleman in black. Eor 
 Christabel the Park was like a scene in a stage play. 
 
 Then, after breakfast, there were long drives into fair 
 suburban haunts, where they escaped in some degree from 
 London smoke and London restraints of all kinds, where they 
 could charter a boat, and row up the river to a still fairer scene, 
 and picnic in some rushy creek, out of ken of society, and be 
 almost a.s recklessly gay as if they had been at Tintagel.
 
 64 Mount Royal. 
 
 These were the days Angus loved best. The days upon 
 which he and his betrothed turned their backs upon London 
 society, and seemed as far away from the outside world as ever 
 they had been upc*u the wild western coast. Like most men 
 educated at Eton and Oxford, and brought up in the neighbour- 
 hood of the metropolis, Angus loved the Thames with a love that 
 was almost a passion. 
 
 ' It is my native country,' he said ; ' I have no other. All 
 the pleasantest associations of my boyhood and youth are inter- 
 woven with the river. When I die, my spirit ought to haunt 
 these shores, like that ghost of the 'Scholar Gipsy,' which you 
 have read about in Arnold's poem.' 
 
 He knew every bend and reach of the river — every tribu- 
 tary, creek, and eyot — almost every row of pollard willows, 
 standing stunted and grim along the bank, like a line of rugged 
 old men. He knew where the lilies grew, and where there 
 were chances of trout. The haunts of monster pike were familiar 
 to him— indeed, he declared that he knew many of these gentle- 
 men personally — that they were as old as the Fontainebleau carp, 
 and bore a charmed life. 
 
 ' When I was at Eton I knew them all by sight,' he said. 
 ' There was one which I set my heart upon landing, but he was 
 ever so much stronger and cleverer than I. If I had caught him 
 I should have worn his skin ever after, in the pride of my 
 heart, like Hercules with his lion. But he still inhabits the 
 same creek, still sulks among the same rushes, and devours the 
 gentler members of the finny race by shoals. We christened 
 him Dr. Parr, for we knew he was preternaturally old, and 
 we thought he must, from mere force of association, be a pro- 
 found scholar.' 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh was always finding reasons for these country 
 excursions, which he declared were the one sovereign antidote 
 for the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms, and the evil 
 effects of late hours. 
 
 'You wouldn't like to see C'hristabel fade and languish like 
 the flowers in your drawing-room,' he urged, when Mrs. Tre- 
 gonell wanted her niece to make a round of London visits, 
 instead of going down to Maidenhead on the coach, to lunch 
 somewhere up the river. Not at Skindle's, or at any other 
 hotel, but in the lazy sultry quiet of some sequestered nook 
 below the hanging woods of Clieveden. ' I'm sure you can 
 spare her just for to-day — such a perfect spring day. It would 
 be a crime to waste such sunlight and such balmy air in town 
 drawing-rooms. Could not you strain a point, dear M*s. Tie- 
 gonell, and come with us 1 " 
 
 Aunt Diana shook h3r head. No, the fatigue would be too 
 *uuch — she had lived such a quiet life at Mount Eoyal, that a
 
 In Society. G5 
 
 very little exertion tired her. Besides she had some calls to 
 make ; and then there was a dinner at Lady Bulteel's, to which 
 she must take Christabel, and an evening party afterwards. 
 
 Christabel shrugged her shoulders impatiently. 
 
 ' I am beginning to hate parties,' she said. ' They are 
 amusing enough when one is in them — but they are all alike — 
 and it would be so much nicer for us to live our own lives, and 
 go wherever Angus likes. Don't you think you might defer the 
 calls, and come with us to-day, Auntie dear 1 ' 
 
 Auntie dear shook her head. 
 
 ' Even if I were equal to the fatigue, Belle, I couldn't defer 
 my visits. Thursday is Lady Onslow's day — and Mrs. Trevan- 
 nion's day — and Mrs. Vansittart's day— and when people have 
 been so wonderfully kind to us, it would be uncivil not to 
 axil.' 
 
 ' And you will sit in stifling drawing-rooms, with the curtains 
 lowered to shut out the sunlight — and you will drink ever so 
 much more tea than is good for you — and hear a lot of people 
 prosing about the same things over and over again — Epsom and 
 the Opera — and Mrs. This and Miss That — and Mrs. Somebody's 
 new book, which everybody reads and talks about, just as 
 if there were not another book in the world, or as if the old 
 book counted for nothing,' concluded Christabel, contemptuously, 
 having by this time discovered the conventional quality ol 
 kettle- drum conversations, wherein people discourse authorita- 
 tively about books they have not read, plays they have not seen, 
 and people they do not know. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh had his own way, and carried off Christabel 
 and Miss Bridgeman to the White Horse Cellar, with the 
 faithful Major in attendance. 
 
 ' You will bring Belle home in time to dress for Lady 
 Bulteel's dinner,' said Mrs. Tregonell, impressively, as they were 
 departing. ' Mind, Major, I hold you responsible for her return. 
 You are the only sober person in the party. I believe Jessie 
 Bridgeman is as wild as a hawk, when she gets out of my sight.' 
 
 Jessie's shrewd grey eyes twinkled at the reproof. 
 
 ' I am not very sorry to get away from Bolton Bow, and 
 the fine ladies who come to see you — and who always look at 
 me as much as to say, " Who is she 1 — what is she 1 — how did 
 she come here 1 " — and who are obviously surprised if I say 
 anything intelligent — first, at my audacity in speaking befoi'e 
 company, and next that such a thing as I should have any 
 brains.' 
 
 ' Nonsense, Jessie, how thin-skinned you are ; everybody 
 praises you,' said Mrs. Tregonell, while they all waited on tho 
 threshold for Christabel to fasten her eight-button gloves — » 
 delicate operation, in which she was asaiatttd by Mr. Hamleigh.
 
 66 Mount Royal. 
 
 'How clever you are at buttoning gloves,' exclaimed 
 Christabel ; ' one would think you had served an apprenticeship.' 
 
 'That's not the first pair he iias buttoned, I'll wager,' cried 
 the Major, in his loud, hearty voice ; and then, seeing Angus 
 redden ever so slightly, and remembering certain rumours which 
 he had heard at his club, the kindly bachelor regretted his 
 speech. 
 
 Happily, Christabel was engaged at this moment in kissing 
 her aunt, and did not observe Mr. Hamleicrli's heightened colour. 
 Ten minutes later they were all seated outside the coach, bowling 
 down Piccadilly Hill on their way westward. 
 
 ' In the good old days this is how you would have started for 
 Cornwall,' said Angus. 
 
 ' I wish we were going to Cornwall now.' 
 
 ' So do I, if your aunt would let us be married at that dear 
 little church in the glen. Christabel, when I die, if you have 
 the ordering of my funeral, be sure that I am buried in Minster 
 Churchyard.' 
 
 ' Angus, don't,' murmured Christabel, piteously. 
 
 ' Dearest, " we must all die — 'tis an inevitable chance — the 
 first Statute in Magna Charta — it is an everlasting Act of Par- 
 liament " — that's what he says of death, dear, who jested at all 
 things, and laid his cap and bells down one day in a lodging in 
 Bond Street — the end of which we passed just now — sad and 
 lonely, and perhaps longing for the kindred whom he had 
 forsaken.' 
 
 ' You mean Sterne,' said Christabel. ' Jessie and I hunted 
 for that house, yesterday. I think we all feel sorrier for him 
 than for many a better man.' 
 
 In the early afternoon they had reached their destination — a 
 lovely creek shaded by chestnut and alder — a spot known to few, 
 and rarely visited. Here, under green leaves, they moored their 
 boat, and lunched on the contents of a basket which had been 
 got ready for them at Skindle's — dawdling over the meal — taking 
 their ease— full of talk and laughter. Never had Angus 
 looked better, or talked more gaily. Jessie, too, was at her 
 brightest, and had a great deal to say. 
 
 ' It is wonderful how well you two get on,' said Christabel, 
 smiling at her friend's prompt capping of some bitter little speech 
 from Angus. ' You always seem to understand each other so 
 quickly — indeed, Jessie seems to know what Angus is going to 
 aay before the words are spoken. I can see it in her face.' 
 
 'Perhaps, that is because we are both cynics,' said Mr. 
 Hamleigh. 
 
 ' Yes, that is no doubt the reason,' said Jessie, reddening a 
 little ; ' the bond of sympathy between us is founded on our very 
 poor opinion of our fellow-creatures.'
 
 In Society. 67 
 
 But after this Miss Bridgeman became more silent, and 
 gave way much less than usual to those sudden impulses of sharp 
 speech which Christabel had noticed. 
 
 They landed presently, and went wandering away into the 
 inland — a strange world to Christabel, albeit very familiar to 
 her lover. 
 
 ' Not far from here there is a dell which is the most won- 
 derful place in the world for bluebells,' said Angus, looking at 
 his watch. 'I wonder whether we should have time to walk 
 there.' 
 
 ' Let us try, if it is not very, very far,' urged Christabel. ' I 
 adore bluebells, and skylarks, and the cuckoo, and all the dear 
 country flowers and birds. I have been surfeited with hot-house 
 flowers and caged canaries since I came to London.' 
 
 A skylark was singing in the deep blue, far aloft, over the 
 little wood in which they were wandering. It was the loneliest, 
 loveliest spot ; and Christabel felt as if it would be agony to leave 
 it. She and her lover seemed ever so much nearer, dearer, more 
 entirely united here than in London drawing-rooms, where she 
 hardly dared to be civil to him lest society should be amused or 
 contemptuous. Here she coidd cling to his arm — it seemed a 
 strong and helpful arm now — and look up at his face with 
 love irradiating her own countenance, and feel no more ashamed 
 than Eve in the Garden. Here they could talk without fear of 
 being heard ; for Jessie and the Major followed at a most respect- 
 ful distance — just keeping the lovers in view, and no more. 
 
 Christabel ran back presently to say they were going to look 
 for bluebells. 
 
 ' You'll c</tne, won't you ? ' she pleaded ; ' Angus says the 
 dell is not far off.' 
 
 ' I don't believe a bit in his topography,' said the Major ; ' do 
 you happen to know that it is three o'clock, and that you are due 
 at a State dinner V 
 
 ' At eight,' cried Christabel, ' ages away. Angus says the 
 train goes at six. We are to have some tea at Skindle's, at five. 
 We have two hours in which to do what we like.' 
 
 ' There is the row back to Skindle's.' 
 
 ' Say half an hour for that, which gives us ninety minutes for 
 the bluebells.' 
 
 ' Do you count life by minutes, child V asked the Major. 
 
 ' Yes, Uncle Oliver, when I am utterly happy ; for then every 
 minute is precious.' 
 
 And then she and her lover went rambling on, talking, 
 laughing, poetising under the flickering shadows and glancing 
 lights ; while the other two followed at a leisurely pace, like the 
 dull foot of reality following the winged heel of romance. 
 Jessie Bridgeman was only twenty-seven, yet in her own min-d 
 
 -■•
 
 68 Mount Royal. 
 
 it seemed as if she were the Major's contemporary — nay, 
 indeed, his senior : for he had never known that grinding poverty 
 which ages the eldest daughter in a large shabby genteel family. 
 Jessie Bridgeman had been old in care before she left off pina- 
 fores. Her childish pleasure in the shabbiest of dolls had been 
 poisoned by a precocious familiarity with poor-rates and water- 
 rates — a sickening dread of the shabby man in pepper-and-salt 
 tweed, with the end of an oblong account-book protruding from 
 his breast-pocket, who came to collect money that was never 
 ready for him, and departed, leaving a printed notice, like the 
 trail of the serpent, behind him. The first twenty years of Jessie 
 Bridgeman's life had been steeped in poverty, every day, every 
 hour flavoured with the bitter taste of deprivation and the 
 world's contempt, the want of common comforts, the natural 
 longing for fairer surroundings, the ever-present dread of a still 
 lower deep in which pinching should become starvation, and even 
 the shabby home should be no longer tenable. With a father 
 whose mission upon this earth was to docket and file a certain 
 class of accounts in Somerset House, for a salary of a hundred- 
 and-eighty pounds a year, and a bi-annual rise of five, a harmless 
 man. whose only crime was to have married young and made 
 himself responsible for an unanticipated family — ' How could a 
 young fellow of two-and-twenty know that God was going to 
 afflict him with ten children V Mr. Bridgeman used to observe 
 plaintively — with a mother whose life was one long domestic 
 drudgery, who spent more of her days in a back kitchen than ia 
 consistent with the maintenance of personal dignity, and whose 
 only chance of an airing was that stern necessity which impelled 
 her to go and interview the tax-gatherer, in the hope of obtaining 
 ' time ' — Jessie's opportunities of tasting the pleasures of youth 
 had been of the rarest. Once in six months or so, perhaps, 3 
 shabby-genteel fn v nd gave her father an order for some theatre, 
 which was in that palpable stage of ruin when orders are freely 
 given to the tavern loafer and the stage-door hanger-on — and 
 then, oh, what rapture to trudge from Shepherd's Bush to the 
 West End, and to spend a long hot evening in the gassy paradise 
 of the Upper Boxes ! Once in a year or so Mr. Bridgeman gave 
 his wife and eldest girl a dinner at an Italian Restaurant near 
 Leicester Square — a cheap little pinchy dinner, in which the 
 meagre modicum of meat and poultry was eked out by much 
 sauce, redolent of garlic, by delicious foreign bread, and too- 
 cdorous foreign cheese. It was a tradition in the family that 
 Mr. Bridgeman had been a great dinner-giver in his bachelor 
 lays, and knew every restaurant in London. 
 
 ' They don't forget me here, you see,' he said, when the sleek 
 Italian waiter brought him extra knives and forks for the dual 
 portion which was to serve for three.
 
 In Society. 69 
 
 Such had been the utmost limit of Jessie's pleasures before 
 she answered an advertisement in the Times, which stated that 
 a lady, living in a retired part of Cornwall, required the services 
 of a young lady who could write a good hand, keep accounts, and 
 had some knowledge of housekeeping — who was willing, active, 
 theerful, and good-tempered. Salary, thirty pounds per annum. 
 
 It was not the first advertisement by many that Jessie had 
 answered. Indeed, she seemed, to her own mind, to have been 
 doing nothing but answering advertisements, and hoping against 
 hope for a favourable reply, since her eighteenth birthday, when 
 it had been borne in upon her, as the Evangelicals say, that she 
 ought to go out into the world, and do something for her living, 
 making one mouth less to be filled from the family bread-pan. 
 
 ' There's no use talking, mother,' she said, when Mrs. Bridgeman 
 tried to prove that the bright useful eldest daughter cost nothing ; 
 ' I eat, and food costs money. I have a dreadfully healthy appetite, 
 and if I could get a decent situation I should cost you nothing, 
 and should be able to send you half my salary. And now that 
 Milly is getting a big girl ' 
 
 ' She hasn't an idea of making herself useful,' sighed the 
 mother ; ' only yesterday she let the milkman ring three times 
 and then march away without leaving us a drop of milk, because 
 she was too proud or to lazy to open the door, while Sarah and I 
 were up to our eyes in the wash.' 
 
 ' Perhaps she didn't hear him,' suggested Jessie, charitably. 
 
 ' She must have heard his pails if she didn't hear him,' said 
 Mrs. Bridgeman ; ' besides he " yooped," for I heard him, and 
 relied upon that idle child for taking in the milk. But put not 
 your trust in princes,' concluded the overworked matron, rather 
 vaguely. 
 
 ' Salary, thirty pounds per annum,' repeated Jessie, reading 
 the Cornish lady's advertisement over and over again, as if it 
 had been a charm ; ' why that would be a perfect fortune ! think 
 what you coidd do with an extra fifteen pounds a year ! ' 
 
 ' My dear, it would make my life heaven. But you would 
 want all the money for your dress : you would have to be always 
 nice. There would be dinner parties, no doubt, and you would 
 be asked to come into the drawing-room of an evening,' said Mrs. 
 Bridgeman, whose ideas of the governess's social status were 
 derived solely from ' Jane Eyre.' 
 
 Jessie's reply to the advertisement was straightforward and 
 succinct, and she wrote a fine bold hand. These two facts 
 favourably impressed Mrs. Tregonell, and of the three or four 
 dozen answers which her advertisement brought forth, Jessie's 
 
 f)leased her the most. The young lady's references to her father's 
 andlord and the incumbent of the nearest church, were satis- 
 factory. So one bleak wintry morning Miss Bridgeman left
 
 70 Mount Royal. 
 
 Paddington in one of the Great "Western's almost luxurious 
 third-class carriages, and travelled straight to Launceston, whence 
 a carnage — the very first private carriage she had ever sat in, 
 and every detail of which was a wonder and a delight to her — 
 conveyed her to Mount Royal. 
 
 That line old Tudor manor-house, after the shabby ten-roemed 
 villa at Shepherd's Bush — badly built, badly drained, badly 
 situated, badly furnished, always smelling of yesterday's dinner, 
 always damp and oozy with yesterday's rain — was almost too 
 Deautiful to be real. For days after her arrival Jessie felt as if 
 she must be walking about in a dream. The elegancies and 
 luxuries of life were all new to her. The perfect quiet and order 
 of this country home ; the beauty in every detail — from the old 
 silver urn and Worcester china which greeted her eyes on the 
 breakfast-table, to the quaint little Queen Anne candlestick which 
 she carried up to her bedroom at night — seemed like a revelation 
 of a hitherto unknown world. The face of Nature — the hills 
 and the moors — the sea and the cliffs — was as new to her as 
 all that indoor luxury. An occasional week at Eamsgate or 
 Southend had been all her previous experience of this world's 
 loveliness. Happily, she was not a shy or awkward young 
 parson. She accommodated herself with wonderful ease to her 
 altered surroundings — was not tempted to drink out of a finger- 
 glass, and did not waver for a moment as to the proper use 
 of her fish-knife and fork — took no wine — and ate moderately 
 of that luxurious and plentiful fare which was as new and 
 wonderful to her as if she had been transported from the 
 barren larder of Shepherd's Bush to that fabulous land where 
 the roasted piglings ran about with knives and forks in their 
 backs, squeaking, in pig language, 'Come, eat me ; come eat me.' 
 
 Often in this paradise of pasties and clotted cream, mountain 
 mutton and barn-door fowls, she thought with a bitter pang of 
 the hungry circle at home, with whom dinner was the exception 
 rather than the rule, and who made believe to think tea and 
 bloaters an ever so much cosier meal than a formal repast of 
 roast and boiled. 
 
 On the very day she drew her first quarter's salary — not 
 for worlds would she have anticipated it by an hour — Jessie 
 ran off to a farm she knew of, and ordered a monster hamper 
 to be sent to Rosslyn Villa, Shepherd's Bush — a hamper full 
 of chickens, and goose, and cream, and butter, with a big 
 saffron-flavoured eake for its crowning glory — such rv cake as 
 would delight the younger members of the household ! 
 
 Nor did she forget her promise to send the over-tasked 
 house-mother half her earnings. ' You needn't mind taking 
 the money, dearest,' she wrote in the letter which enclosed the 
 Fost-OUice order. ' Mrs. Tregouell has given me a lovely grey
 
 In Society. 71 
 
 silk gown ; and I have bought a brown merino at Launceston, 
 
 and a new hat and jacket. You would stare to see how splen- 
 didly your homely little Jessie is dressed ! Christabel found 
 out the date of my birthday, and gave me a dozen of the 
 loveliest gloves, my favourite grey, with four buttons. A whole 
 dozen ! Did you ever see a dozen of gloves all at once, mother 1 
 You have no idea how lovely they look. I quite shrink from 
 breaking into the packet ; but I must wear a pair at church 
 next Sunday, in compliment to the dear little giver. If it 
 were not for thoughts of you and the brood, dearest, I should 
 be intensely happy here ! The house is an ideal house — the 
 people are ideal people ; and they treat me ever so much better 
 than I deserve. I think I have the knack of being useful to 
 them, which is a great comfort ; and I am able to get on with 
 the servants — old servants who had a great deal too much of 
 their own way before I came — which is also a comfort. It is 
 not easy to introduce reform without making oneself detested. 
 Christabel, who has been steeping herself in French history 
 lately, calls me Turgot in petticoats — by which you will see 
 she has a high opinion of my ministerial talents — if you can 
 remember Turgot, poor dear ! amidst all your worries,' added 
 Jessie, bethinking herself that her mother's book-learning had 
 gone to seed in an atmosphere of petty domestic cares — mending 
 — washing — pinching — contriving. 
 
 This and much more had Jessie Bridgeman written seven 
 years ago, while Mount Royal was still new to her. The 
 place and the people — at least those two whom she first knew 
 there — had grown dearer as time went on. When Leonard 
 came home from the University, he and his mother's factotum 
 did not get on quite so well as Mrs. Tregonell had hoped. 
 Jessie was ready to be kind and obliging to the heir of^ 
 the house ; but Leonard did not like her — in the language of 
 the servants' hall, he 'put his back up at her.' He looked 
 upon her as an interloper and a spy, especially suspecting her 
 in the latter capacity, perhaps from a linking consciousness that 
 some of his actions would not bear the fierce light of un- 
 friendly observation. In vain did his mother plead for her 
 favourite. 
 
 ' You have no idea how good she is ! ' said Mrs. TregonelL 
 ' You're perfectly right there, mother ; I have not,' retorted 
 Leonard. 
 
 ' And so useful t© me! I should be lost without her ! ' 
 
 'Of course; that's exactly what she wants: creeping and 
 
 crawling — and pinching and saving — docking your tradesmen's 
 
 mis — grinding your servants— lingering your income — till, 
 
 by-aud-by, she will contrive to ringer a good deal of it into 
 
 her own pocket I That's the way they all begin — that's the
 
 72 Mount Royal. 
 
 way the man in the play, Sir Giles Overreach's man, began, you 
 may be sure — till by-and-by he got Sir Giles under his thumb. 
 And that's the way Miss Bridgeman will serve you. I wonder 
 you are so short-sighted.' 
 
 "Weak as Mrs. Tregonell was in her love for her son, she was 
 too staunch to be set against a person she liked by any such 
 assertions as these. She was quite able to form her own opinion 
 about Miss Bridgeman's character, and she found the girl 
 straight as an arrow — candid almost to insolence, yet pleasant 
 withal ; industrious, clever — sharp as a needle in all domestic 
 details — able to manage pounds as carefully as she had managed 
 pence and sixpences. 
 
 ' Mother used to give me the housekeeping purse,' she said, 
 ' and I did what I liked. I was always Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer. It was a very small exchequer ; but I learnt the habit 
 ef spending and managing, and keeping accounts.' 
 
 While active and busy about domestic affairs, verifying 
 accounts, settling supplies and expenditures with the cook- 
 housekeeper, making herself a veritable clerk of the kitchen, 
 and overlooking the housemaids in the finer details of their 
 work, Miss Bridgeman still found ample leisure for the improve- 
 ment of her mind. In a quiet country house, where family 
 prayers are read at eight o'clock every morning, the days are 
 long enough for all things. Jessie had no active share in 
 Christabel's education, which was Mrs. Tregonell's delight and 
 care ; but she contrived to learn what Christabel learnt — tc 
 sti«Jy with her and read with her, and often to outrun her in 
 the pursuit of a favourite subject. They learnt German 
 together, they read good French books together, and were com- 
 panions in the best sense of the word. It was a happy life — 
 monotonous, uneventful, but a placid, busy, all-satisfying life, 
 which Jessie Bridgeman led during those six years and a half 
 which went before the advent of Angus Hamleigh at Mount 
 Royal. The companion's salary had long ago been doubled, and 
 Jessie, who had no caprices, and whose wants were modest, was 
 able to send forty pounds a year to Shepherd's Bush, and found 
 a rich reward in the increased cheerfulness of the letters from 
 home. 
 
 Just so much for Jessie Bridgeman's history as she walks by 
 Major Bree's side in the sunlight, with a sharply cut face, 
 impressed with a gravity beyond her years, and marked with 
 precocious lines that were drawn there by the iron hand of 
 poverty before she had emerged from girlhood. Of late, even 
 amidst the elegant luxuries of May Fair, in a life given over to 
 amusement, among flowers and bright scenery, and music and 
 pictures, those lines had been growing deeper — lines that hinted 
 •it a secret care.
 
 In Society. 73 
 
 ' Isn't it delightful to see them together ! ' said the Major, 
 looking af tor those happy lovers with a benevolent smile. 
 
 ' Yes ; I suppose it is very beautiful to see such perfect 
 happiness, like Juan and Haidee before Larnbro swooped down 
 upon them,' returned Miss Bridgeman, who was too outspoken 
 to be ashamed of having read Byron's epic. 
 
 Major Bree had old-fashioned notions about the books women 
 should and should not read, and Byron, except for elegant 
 extracts, was in his Index expurgatorius. If a woman was 
 allowed to read the ' Giaour,' she would inevitably read ' Don 
 Juan,' he argued ; there would be no restraining her, after she 
 had tasted blood — no use in offering her another poet, and 
 saying, Now you can read ' Thalaba,' or ' Peter Bell.' 
 
 'They were so happy!' said Jessie, dreamily,' so young, 
 and one so innocent ; and then came fear, severance, despair, and 
 death for the innocent sinner. It is a terrible story ! ' 
 
 'Fortunately, there is no tyrannical father in this case,' 
 replied the cheerful Major. ' Everybody is pleased with the 
 engagement — everything smiles upon the lovers.' 
 
 ' No, it is all sunshine,' said Jessie ; ' there is no shadow, if 
 Mr. Hamleigh is as worthy of her as we all think him. Yet 
 there was a time when you spoke rather disparagingly of him.' 
 
 ' My gossiping old tongue shall be cut out for repeating club 
 scandals ! Hamleigh is a generous-hearted, noble-natured 
 fellow, and I am not afraid to trust him with the fate of a girl 
 whom I love almost as well as if she were my own daughter. 
 I don't know whether all men love their daughters, by the bye. 
 There are daughters and daughters — I have seen some that it 
 would be tough work to love. But for Christabel my affection 
 is really pn rental. I have seen her bud and blossom, a beautiful 
 living flower, a rose in the garden of life.' 
 
 ' And you think Mr. Hamleigh is worthy of her 1 ' said Miss 
 Bridgeman, looking at him searchingly with her shrewd grey 
 eyes, ' in spite of what you heard at the clubs 1 ' 
 
 ' A fico for what I heard at the clubs ! ' exclaimed the 
 Major, blowing the slander away from the tips of his fingers as 
 if it had been thistledown. 'Every man has a past, and every 
 man outlives it. The present and the future are what we have 
 to consider. It is not a man's history, but the man himself, 
 that concerns us ; and I say that Angus Hamleigh is a good 
 man, a right-meaning man. a brave and generous man. If a 
 man is to be judged by his history, where would David be, I 
 should like to know 1 and yet David was the chosen of the 
 Lord ! ' added the Major, conclusively. 
 
 ' I hope,' said Jessie, earnestly, with vague visions of intrigue 
 and murder conjured up in her mind, ' that Mr. Hamleigh was 
 never as bad as David.'
 
 74 Mount Boyal. 
 
 'No, no,' murmured the Major, ' the circumstances of modem 
 times are so different, don't you see ?— an advanced civilization— 
 a greater respect for human life. Napoleon the First did a 
 good many queer things ; but you would not get a monarch and 
 a commander-in-chief to act as David and Joab acted now-a- 
 days. Public opinion would be too strong for them. They 
 would be afraid of the newspapers.' 
 
 ' Was it anything very dreadful that you heard at the clubs 
 three years ago ? ' asked Jessie, still hovering about a forbidden 
 theme, with a morbid curiosity strange in one whose acta and 
 thoughts were for the most part ruled by common sense. 
 
 The Major, who would not allow a woman to r°ad ' Don 
 Juan,' had his own ideas of what ought and ought not to be told 
 to a woman. 
 
 ' My dear Miss Bridgeman,' he said, ' T would not for worlds 
 pollute your ears with the ribald trash men talk in a club 
 smoking-room. Let it suffice for you to know that I believe in 
 Angus Ilamleigh, although I have taken the trouble to make 
 myself acquainted with the follies of his youth.' 
 
 They walked on in silence for a little while after this, and 
 then the Major said, in a voice full of kindness : 
 
 ' I think you went to see your own people yesterday, did you 
 not?' 
 
 ' Yes ; Mrs. Tregonell was kind enough to give me a morn- 
 ing, and I spent it with my mother and sisters.' 
 
 The Major had questioned her more than once about her 
 home in a way which indicated so kindly an interest that it could 
 not possibly be mistaken for idle curiosity. And she had told 
 him, with perfect frankness, what manner of people her family 
 were — in no wise hesitating to admit their narrow means, and 
 the necessity that she should earn her own living. 
 
 ' I hope you found them well and happy.' 
 
 ' I thought my mother looked thin and weary. The girls 
 were wonderfully well — great, hearty, overgrown creatures ! I 
 felt myself a wretched little shrimp among them. As for happi- 
 ness — well, they are as happy as people can expect to be who 
 are very poor ! ' 
 
 ' Do you really think poverty is incompatible with happiness? ' 
 asked the Major, with a philosophical air ; 'I have had a parti- 
 cularly happy life, and I have never been rich.' 
 
 'Ah, that makes all the difference!' exclaimed Jessie. 
 ' You have never been rich, but they have always been poor. 
 You can't conceive what a gulf lies between those two positions. 
 You have been obliged to deny yourself a great many of th« 
 mere idle luxuries of life, I dare say — hunters, the latest 
 improvements in guns, valuable dogs, continental travelling; 
 but you have had enough for all the needful things — for neat-
 
 In Society. 75 
 
 nests, cleanliness, an orderly household ; a well-kept flower- 
 garden, everything spotless and bright about you ; no slipshod 
 niaid-of-all-work printing her greasy thumb upon your dishes — - 
 nothing out at elbows. Your house is small, but of its kind it 
 is perfection ; and your garden — well, if I had such a garden in 
 such a situation I would not envy Eve the Eden she lost.' 
 
 ' Is that really your opinion?' cried the enraptured soldier; 
 'or are you saying this just to please me — to reconcile me to my 
 jog-trot life, my modest surroundings '? ' 
 
 ' I mean every word I say.' 
 
 ' Then it is in your power to make me richer in happiness 
 than Rothschild or Baring. Dearest Miss Bridgeman, dearest 
 Jessie, I think you must know how devotedly I love you ! Till 
 to-day I have not dared to speak, for my limited means would 
 not have allowed me to maintain a wife as the woman I love 
 ought to be maintained ; but this morning's post brought me 
 the news of the death of an old Admiral of the Blue, who was 
 my father's first cousin. He was a bachelor like myself — left 
 the Navy soon after the signing of Sir Henry Pottinger's treaty 
 at Nankin in '42 — never considered himself well enough off to 
 marry, but lived in a lodging at Devonport, and hoarded and 
 hoarded and hoarded for the mere abstract pleasure of ac- 
 cumulating his surplus income ; and the result of his hoarding 
 — combined with a little dodging of his investments in stocks and 
 shares — is, that he leaves me a solid four hundred a year in Great 
 Westerns. It is not much from some people's point of view, 
 but, added to my existing income, it makes me very comfortable. 
 I could afford to indulge all your simple wishes, my dearest ! I 
 could afford to help your family ! ' 
 
 He took her hand. She did not draw it away, but pressed 
 his gently, with the grasp of friendship. 
 
 ' Don't say one word more — you are too good — you are the 
 best and kindest man I have ever known ! ' she said, ' and I shall 
 love and honour you all my life ; but I shall never marry ! 1 
 made up my mind about that, oh ! ever so long ago. Indeed, I 
 never expected to be asked, if the truth must be told.' 
 
 ' I understand,' said the Major terribly dashed. ' I am too 
 old. Don't suppose that I have not thought about that. I have. 
 But I fancied the difficulty might be got over. You are s« 
 different from the common run of girls — so staid, so sensible, of 
 such a contented disposition. But I was a fool to suppose that 
 any girl of ' 
 
 ' Seven-and-twenty,' interrupted Jessie ; ' it is a long way up 
 the hill of girlhood. I shall soon be going down on the other side. : 
 
 ' At any rate, you are more than twenty years my junior. I 
 was a fool to forget that.' 
 
 ' Dear Major Bree,' said Jessie, very earnestly, ' believe me,
 
 76 Mount Royal. 
 
 it is not for that reason, I say No. If you were as young — as 
 young as Mr. Hamleigh — the answer would be just the same. 
 I shall never marry. There is no one, prince or peasant, whom 
 I care to marry. You are much too good a man to be married 
 for thesake of a happy home, for status in the world, kindly 
 companionship — all of which you could give me. If I loved you 
 as you ought to be loved I would an.-sver proudly, Yes; but I 
 honour you too much to give you half love.' 
 
 ' Perhaps you do not know with how little I could be satis- 
 fied,' urged the Major, opposing what he imagined to be a 
 romantic scruple with the shrewd common-sense of his fifty years' 
 experience. ' I want a friend, a companion, a helpmate, and I 
 am sure you could be all those to me. If I could only make you 
 happy ! ' 
 
 ' You could not ! ' interrupted Jessie, with cruel decisiveness. 
 •Pray, never speak of this again, dear Major Bree. Your 
 friendship has been very pleasant to me ; it has been one of the 
 many charms of my life at Mount Eoyal. I would not lose it 
 for the world. And we can always be friends, if you will only 
 remember that I have made up my mind — irrevocably — never to 
 marry.' 
 
 ' I must needs obey you,' said the Major, deeply disappointed 
 out too unselfish to be angry. ' I will not be importunate. Yet, 
 jne word I must say. Your future — if you do not marry — what 
 is that to be 1 Of course, so long as Mrs. Tregonell lives, your 
 home will be at Mount Eoyal— but I fear that does not settle 
 the question for long. My dear friend does not appear to me a 
 long-lived woman. I have seen traces of premature decay. 
 When Christabel is married, and Mrs. Tregonell is dead, where 
 is your home to be ' 
 
 ' Providence will find me one,' answered Jessie, cheerfully. 
 Providence is wonderfully kind to plain little spinsters with a 
 knack of making themselves useful. I have been doing my best 
 to educate myself ever since I have been at Mount Royal. It is 
 so easy to improve one's mind when there are no daily worries 
 about the tax-gatherer and the milkman— and when I am called 
 upon to seek a new home, I can go out as a governess — and 
 drink the cup of life as it is mixed for governesses— as Charlotte 
 Bronte says. Perhaps I shall write a novel, as she did, although 
 I have not her genius.' 
 
 ' I would not be sure of that,' said the Major. ' I believe 
 there is some kind of internal fire burning you up, although you 
 are outwardly so quiet, I think it would have been your salvation 
 to accept the jog-trot life and peaceful home I have offered you.' 
 
 'Very likely,' replied Jessie, with a shrug and a sigh. 'But 
 how many people reject salvation. They would rather be 
 miserable in their own way than happy in anybody else's way.'
 
 In Society. 77 
 
 The Major answered never a word. For him all the glory of 
 the day had faded. He walked slowly on by Jessie's side, 
 meditating upon her words — wondering why she had so reso- 
 lutely refused him. There had been not the least wavering- 
 she had not even seemed to be taken by surprise — her mind had 
 been made up long ago — not him, nor any other man, would 
 she wed. 
 
 ' Some early disappointment, perhaps,' mused the Major — ' a 
 curate at Shepherd's Bush — those young men have a great deal 
 to answer for.' 
 
 They came to the hyacinth dell — an earthly paradise to the 
 two happy lovers, who were sitting on a mossy bank, in a sheet 
 of azure bloom, which, seen from the distance, athwart young 
 trees, looked like blue, bright water. 
 
 To the Major the hazel copse and the bluebells — the young 
 oak plantation — and all the lovely details of mosses and flowering 
 grasses, and starry anemones — were odious. He felt in a hurry 
 to get back to his club, and steep himself in London pleasures. 
 All the benevolence seemed to have been crashed out of him. 
 
 Christabel saw that her old friend was out of spirits, and con- 
 trived to be by his side on their way back to the boat, trying to 
 cheer him with sweetest words and loveliest smiles. 
 
 ' Have we tired you 1 ' she asked. ' The afternoon is very 
 warm.' 
 
 ' Tired me ! You forget how I ramble over the hills at home. 
 No ; I am just a trifle put out — but it is nothing. I had news 
 of a death this morning — a death that makes me richer by four 
 hundred a year. If it were not for respect for my dead cousin 
 who so kindly made me his heir, I think I should go to-night to 
 the most rowdy theatre in London, just to put myself in spirits 
 
 1 Which are the rowdy theatres, Uncle Oliver 1 ' 
 
 1 Well, perhaps I ought not to use such a word. The theatres 
 'are all good in their way — but there are theatres and theatres. 
 I should choose one of those to which the young men go night 
 after night to see the same piece — a burlesque, or an opera bouffe 
 — plenty of smart jokes and pretty girls.' 
 
 ' Why have you not taken me to those theatres ? ' 
 
 ' We have not come to them yet. You have se-m Shakespeare 
 and modern comedy — which is rather a weak material as com- 
 pared with Sheridan — or even with Colman and Morton, v hose 
 plays were our staple entertainment when I was a boy. You 
 have heard all the opera singers 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes, you have been very good. "But I want to f^e " Cupid 
 and Psyche" — two of my partners last night talked to me of 
 " Cupid and Psyche," and were astounded that I had not seen 
 it. I felt quite ashamed of my ignorance. I asked one of my 
 partners, who was particularly enthusiastic, to tell me all about
 
 78 Mount Royal. 
 
 the play — and he did— to tlie best of his ability, which was 
 not great— and he said that a Miss Mayne — Stella Mayue — 
 iv 1,0 plays Psyche, is simply adorable. She is the loveliest 
 woman in London, he says — and was greatly surprised that she 
 Iiad not been pointed out to me in the Park. Now really, 
 Uncle Oliver, this is very remiss in you — you who are so clever 
 in showing me famous people when we are driving in the Park.' 
 
 'My dear, we have not happened to see her — that is all,' 
 replied the Major, without any responsive smile at the bright 
 young face smiling up at him. 
 
 ' You have seen her, I suppose ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, I saw her when I was last in London.' 
 
 •Not this time?' 
 
 * Not this time.' 
 
 'You most unenthusiastic person. But, I understand your 
 motive. You have been waiting an opportunity to take Jessie 
 and me to see this divine Psyche. Is she absolutely lovely?' 
 
 ' Loveliness is a matter of opinion. She is generally accepted 
 as a particularly pretty woman.' 
 
 ' When will you take me to see her ?' 
 
 ' I have no idea. You have so many engagements — your 
 aunt is always making new ones. I can do nothing without 
 her permission. Surely you like dancing better than sitting 
 in a theatre ? ' 
 
 ' No, I do not. Dancing is delightful enough — but to be in 
 a theatre is to be in fairy-land. It is like going into a new 
 world. I leave myself, and my own life, at the doors — and go 
 to live and love and suffer and be glad with the people in the 
 play. To see a powerful play — really well acted — such acting 
 as we have seen — is to live a new life from end to end in a few 
 hours. It is like getting the essence of a lifetime without any 
 of the actual pain— for when the situation is too terrible, one 
 can pinch oneself and say — it is only a dream — an acted dream.' 
 
 ' If you like powerful plays— plays that make you tremble 
 and cry — you would not care twopence for " Cupid and Psyche," ' 
 said Major Bree. ' It is something between a burlesque and i^ 
 fairy comedy— a most frivolous kind of entertainment, I believe.' 
 
 ' I don't care how frivolous it is. I have set my heart upon 
 seeing it. I don't want to be out of the fashion. If you won't 
 get me a box at the — where is it I' 
 
 'The Kaleidoscope Theatre.' 
 
 ' At the Kaleidoscope ! I shall ask Angus.' 
 
 ' Please don't. I — I shall be seriously offended if you do. 
 Let me arrange the business with your aunt. If you really want 
 to see the piece, I suppose you must see it — but not unless your 
 aunt likes.' 
 
 ' Dear, dearest, kindest uncle Oliver 1 ' cried Ckriatabel,
 
 In Society. 79 
 
 squeezing his arm. 'From my childhood upwards you have 
 always fostered my self-will by the blindest indulgence. I was 
 afraid that, all at once, you were going to be unkind and 
 thwart me.' 
 
 Major Bree was thoughtful and silent for the rest of the 
 afternoon, and although Jessie tried to be as sharp-spoken and 
 vivacious as usual, the effort would have been obvious to any 
 two people properly qualified to observe the actions and expressions 
 of others. But Angus and Christabel, being completely absorbed 
 in each other, saw nothing amiss in their companions. 
 
 The river and the landscape were divine — a river for gods — 
 a wood for nymphs — altogether too lovely for mortals. Tea, 
 served on a little round table in the hotel garden, was perfect. 
 
 ' How much nicer than the dinner to-night ! ' exclaimed 
 Christabel. 'I wish we were not going. And yet, it will be 
 very pleasant, I daresay — a table decorated with the loveliest 
 flowers — well-dressed women, clever men, all talking as if there 
 was not a care in life — and perhaps we shall be next each 
 other,' added the happy girl, looking at Angus. 
 
 ' What a comfort for me that I am out of it,' said Jessie. 
 'How nice to be an insignificant young woman whom nobody 
 ever dreams of asking to dinner. A powdered old dowager 
 did actually hint at my going to her musical evening the other 
 day when she called in Bolton Bow. " Be sure you come early," 
 she said gushingly, to Mrs. Tregonell and Christabel ; and then, 
 in quite another key, glancing at me, she added, and " if 
 Miss — er — er would like to hear my singers, I should be — er 
 — delighted," do doubt mentally adding, " I hope she won't have 
 the impertinence to take me at my word."' 
 
 'Jessie, you are the most evil-thinking person T ever knew,' 
 cried Christabel. 'I'm sure Lady Millamont meant to be civil.' 
 
 ' Yes, but she did not mean me to go to her party,' retorted 
 Jessie. 
 
 The happy days — the society evenings — slipped by — dining 
 — music — dancing. And now came the brief bright season of 
 rustic entertainments — more dancing — more music — lawn-tennis 
 — archery — water parties — every device by which the summer 
 hours may chime in tune with pleasure. It was July — Christabel's 
 birthday had come and gone, bring a necklace of single diamonds 
 and a ba-sket of June roses from Angus, and the most perfect 
 thing in Park hacks from Mrs. Tregonell — but Christabel's 
 wedding-day — more fateful than any birthday except the first — 
 had not yet been fixed — albeit Mr. Hamleigh pressed for a decision 
 upon this vital point. 
 
 ' It was to have been at Midsummer,' he said, one day, when 
 he had been discussing the question tete-atcte with Mm 
 TregonelL
 
 80 Mount Boyal. 
 
 1 Indeed, Angus, I never said that. I told you that Chnstabel 
 would be twenty at Midsummer, and that I would not consent 
 to the marriage until after then.' 
 
 ' Precisely, but surely that meant soon after ? I thought we 
 should be married early in July— in time to start for the Tyrol 
 in golden weather.' 
 
 ' I never had any fixed date in my mind,' answered Mrs. 
 Tregonell, with a pained look. Struggle with herself as she 
 might, this engagement of Christabel's was a disappointment and 
 a grief to her. ' I thought- my son would have returned before 
 now. I should not like the wedding to take place in his absence.' 
 ' And I should like him to be at the wedding,' said Angus ; 
 'but I think it will be rather hard if we have to wait foi the ca- 
 price of a,' traveller who, from what Belle tells me of his letters ' 
 
 'Has Belle shown you any of his letters?' asked Mrs. 
 Tregonell, with a vexed look. 
 
 ' No, I don't think he has written to her, has he 1 ' 
 ' No, of course not ; his letters are always addressed to me. 
 He is a wretched correspondent.' 
 
 ' I was going to say, that, from what Belle tells me, your son's 
 movements appear most uncertain, and it really does not seem 
 worth while to wait.' 
 
 ' "When the wedding-day is fixed, I will send him a message 
 by the Atlantic cable. "We must have him at the wedding.' 
 
 Mr. Haraleigh did not see the necessity ; but he was too kind 
 to say so. He pressed for a settlement as to the day— or week— 
 or at least the month in which his marriage was to take place — 
 and at last Mrs. Tregonell consented to the beginning of September. 
 They were all agreed now that the fittest marriage temple for 
 this particular bride and bridegroom was the little old church in 
 the heart of the hills— the church in which Christabel had 
 worshipped every Sunday, morning or afternoon, ever since she 
 could remember. It was Christabel's own desire to kneel before 
 that familiar altar on her wedding-day— in the solemn peacefulness 
 of that loved hill-side, with friendly honest country faces round 
 her—rather than in the midst of a fashionable crowd, attended 
 by bridesmaids after Gainsborough, and page-boys after Vandyke, 
 in an atmosphere heavy with the scent of Ess Bouquet. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh had no near relations— and albeit a whole 
 bevy of cousins and a herd of men from the clubs would have 
 gladly attended to witness his excision from the ranks of gilded 
 youth, and to bid him God-speed on his voyage to the domestic 
 haven— their presence at the sacrifice would have given him no 
 pleasure— while, on the other hand, there was one person resi- 
 dent in London whose presence would have caused him acuta 
 pain. Thus, each of the lovers pleading for the same favour. 
 Mrs. Tregonell had forgone her idea of a London wedding, and
 
 In Society. 81 
 
 had come to see mat it would be very hard upon all the kindly 
 inhabitants of Forrabury and Minster — Boscastle — Trevalga — ■ 
 Bossiney and Trevena — to deprive them of the pleasurablo 
 excitement to be derived from C'hristabel's wedding. 
 
 Early in September, in the golden light of that lovely time, 
 they were to be quietly married in the dear old church, and then 
 away to Tyrolean woods and hills — scenes which, for Christabel, 
 seemed to be the chosen background of poetry, legend, and 
 romance, rather than[an actual country, provided with hotels, and 
 accessible by tourists. Once having consented to the naming of 
 an exact time, Mi's. Tregonell felt there could be no withdrawal 
 of her word. She telegraphed to Leonard, who was somewhere 
 in the Bocky Mountains, with a chosen friend, a' couple of 
 English servants and three or four Canadians, — and who, were 
 he so minded, could be home in a month — and having despatched 
 this message she felt the last wrench had been endured. No- 
 thing that could ever come afterwards — save death itself — could 
 give her sharper pain. 
 
 ' Poor Leonard,' she replied ; ' it will break his heart.' 
 
 In the years that were gone she had so identified herself with 
 her son's hopes and schemes, had so projected her thoughts into 
 his future — seeing him in her waking dreams as he would be in 
 the days to come, a model squire, possessed of all his father's old- 
 fashioned virtues, with a great deal of modern cleverness 
 superadded, a proud and happy husband, the father of a noble 
 race — she had kept this vision of the future in her mind so long, 
 had dwelt upon it so fondly, had coloured it so brightly, that to 
 forego it now, to say to herself ' This thing was but a dream 
 which I dreamed, and it can never be realized,' was like relin- 
 quishing a part of her own life. She was a deeply religious 
 woman, and if called upon to bear physical pain — to suffer the 
 agonies of a slow, incurable illness — she would have suffered 
 with the patience of a Christian martyr, saying to herself, as 
 brave Dr. Arnold said in the agony of his sudden fatal malady, 
 ' Whom He loveth He chasteneth,' — but she could not surrender 
 the day-dream of her life without bitterest repining. In all her 
 love of Christabel, in all her careful education and moral 
 training of the niece to whom she had been as a mother, there 
 had been this leven of selfishness. She had been rearing a wife 
 for her son— such a wife as would be a man's better angel — a 
 guiding, restraining, elevating principle, so interwoven with his 
 life that he should never know himself in leading-strings — an 
 influence so gently exercised that he should never suspect that he 
 was influenced. 
 
 ' Leonard has a noble heart and a fine manly character,' the 
 mother had often told herself ; 'but he wants the association 
 of a milder nature than his own. He is just the kind of man to
 
 82 Mount Moyai. 
 
 be guided and governed by a good wife! — a wife who would 
 obey his lightest wish, and yet rule him always for good.' 
 
 She had seen how, when Leonard had been disposed to act 
 unkindly or illiberally by a tenant, Christ-o,bel had been able to 
 persuade him to kindness or generosity — how, when he had set 
 his face against going to church, being minded to devote Sunday 
 morning to the agreeable duty of cleaning a favourite gun, or 
 physicking a favourite spaniel, or greasing a cherished pair of 
 fishing-boots, Christabel had taken him there — how she had 
 softened and toned down his small social discourtesies, checked 
 his tendency to strong language — and, as it/WGff!^ expurgated, 
 edited, and amended him. 
 
 And having seen and rejoiced in this state of things, it was 
 very hard to be told that another had won the wife she had 
 moulded, after her own fashion, to be the gladness and glory of 
 her son's life ; all the harder because it was her own short-sighted 
 folly which had brought Angus Hamleigh to Mount Royal. 
 
 All through that gay London season — for Christabel a time of 
 unclouded gladness — carking care had been at Mrs. TregonelPs 
 heart. She tried to be just to the niece whom she dearly loved, 
 and who had so tenderly and fully repaid her affection. Yet she 
 could not help feeling as if Christabel's choice was a personal 
 injiuy — nay, almost treachery and ingratitude. ' She must have 
 known that I meant her to be my son's wife,' she said to herself ; 
 ' yet she takes advantage of my poor boy's absence, and gives 
 herself to the first comer.' 
 
 ' Surely September is soon enough,' she said, pettishly, when 
 Angus pleaded for an earlier date. ' You will not have known 
 Christabel for a year, even then. Some men love a girl for half 
 a life-time before they win her. 5 
 
 'But it was not my privilege to know Christabel at the 
 beginning of my life,' replied Angus. ' I made the most of my 
 opportunities by loving her the moment I saw her.' 
 
 ' It is impossible to be angry with you,' sighed Mrs. Tregonell. 
 ' You are so like your father.' 
 
 That was one of the worst hardships of the case. Mrs. 
 rregonell could not help liking the man who had thwarted the 
 dearest desire of her heart. She cculd not help admiring him, 
 and making comparisons between him and Leonard — not to the 
 advantage of her son. Had not her first love been given to his 
 father— the girl's romantic love, ever so much more fervid and 
 intense than any later passion -the love that sees ideal perfection 
 in a lover ?
 
 Cupid and Psyche. 83 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CUPID AND PSYCHE. 
 
 *N Jill the bright June weather, Christabel had been too busy 
 and too happy to remember her caprice about Cupid and Psyche. 
 But just after the Henley week — which to some thousands, and 
 to these two lovers, had been as a dream of bliss — a magical 
 mixture of sunlight and balmy airs and flowery meads, fine 
 gowns and fine luncheons, nigger singers, stone-breaking athletes, 
 gipsy sorceresses, eager to read high fortunes on any hsnd for 
 half-a-crown, rowing men, racing men, artists, actors, poets, 
 critics, swells — just after the wild excitement of that watery 
 saturnalia, Mr. Hamleigh had occasion to go to the North of 
 Scotland to see an ancient kinswoman of his father — an eccentric 
 maiden aunt — who had stood for him, by proxy, at the baptismaJ 
 font, and at the same time announced her intention of leaving 
 him her comfortable fortune, together with all those snuff-mulls, 
 quaighs, knives and forks, spoons, and other curiosities of Cale- 
 donia, which had been in the family for centuries — provided 
 always that he grew up with a high opinion of Mary Stuart, and 
 religiously believed the casket letters to be the vile forgeries of 
 George Buchanan. The old lady, who was a kindly soul, with a 
 broad Scotch tongue, had an inconvenient habit of sending for 
 her nephew at odd times and seasons, when she imagined her- 
 self on the point of death — and he was too kind to turn a deaf 
 ear to this oft-repeated cry of ' wolf '—lest, after making light of 
 her summons, he should hear that the real wolf had come and 
 devoured the harmless, affectionate old lady. 
 
 So now, just when London life was at its gayest and brightest, 
 when the moonlit city after midnight looked like fairy -land, and 
 the Thames Embankment, with its long chain of glittering 
 lamps, gleaming golden above the sapphire river, was a scene un- 
 dream about, Mr. Hamleigh had to order his portmanteau and 
 a hansom, and drive from the Albany to one of the great railway 
 stations in the Euston Road, and to curl himsef up in his corner 
 of the limited mail, scarcely to budge till he was landed at Inver- 
 ness. It was hard to leave Christabel, though it were only for 
 a week. He swore to her that his absence should not outlast a 
 week, unless the grisly wolf called Death did indeed claim hia 
 victim. 
 
 ' T know I shall find the dear old soul up and hearty/ he said, 
 lightly, 'devouring Scotch collops, or haggis, or cock-a-leeky, or 
 Bomething equally loathsome, and offering me some of that t 
 oriinary soup which she always talks of in the pluraL "Do
 
 84 Mount Royal. 
 
 have a few more broth, Angus ; they're very good the day." Bat 
 she is a sweet old woman, despite her barbarities, and one of the 
 happiest days of my life will be that on which I take you to see her.' 
 
 ' And if — if she is not very ill, you will come back soon, 
 won't you, Angus,' pleaded Christabel. 
 
 ' As soon as ever I can tear myself away from the collops and 
 the. few broth. If I find the dear old impostor in rude health, 
 as I quite expect, I will hob and nob with her over one glass of 
 toddy, sleep one night under her roof, and then across the Border 
 as fast as the express will carry me.' 
 
 So they parted ; and Angus had scarcely left Bolton Bow an 
 hour, when Major Bree came in, and, by some random flight 
 of fancy, Christabel remembered ' Cupid and Psyche.' 
 
 The three ladies had just come upstairs after dinner. Mrs. 
 Tregonell was enjoying forty winks in a low capacious chair, 
 near an open window, in the first drawing-room, softly lit by 
 shaded Carcel lamps, scented with tea-roses and stephanotis. 
 Christabel and Jessie were in the tiny third room, where 
 there was only the faint light of a pair of wax candles on 
 the mantelpiece. Here the Major found them, when he 
 came creeping in from the front room, where he had refrained 
 from disturbing Mrs. Tregonell. 
 
 ' Auntie is asleep,' said Christabel. ' "We must talk in 
 subdued murmurs. She looked sadly tired after Mrs. Dulcimer's 
 garden party.' 
 
 I ought not to have come so early,' apologized the Major. 
 
 ' Yes you ought ; we are very glad to have you. It is 
 dreadfully dull without Angus.' 
 
 ' What ! you begin to miss him already 1 ' 
 
 ' Already ! ' echoed Christabel. ' I missed him before the 
 sound of his cab wheels was out of the street. I have been 
 missing him ever since.' 
 
 ' Poor little Belle ! ' 
 
 ' And he is not half-way to Scotland yet,' she sighed. 
 * How long and slow the hours will be ! You must do all 
 you c«n to amuse me. I shall want distractions— dissipation 
 even. If we were at home I should go and wander up by 
 Willapark, and talk to the gulls. Here there is nothing to 
 do. Another stupid garden party at Twickenham to-morrow, 
 exactly opposite the one to-day at Richmond — the only variety 
 being that we shall be on the north bank of the river instead 
 of the south bank— a prosy dinner in Regent's Park the 
 day after. Let me see,' said Christabel, suddenly animated. 
 ' We are quite free for to-morrow evening. We can go and see 
 'Cupid and Psyche,' and I can tell Angus all about it when he 
 somes back. Please get us a nice see-able box, like a dear 
 ■>li!igiug Uncle Oliver, aa you are.'
 
 Cupid and Psyche- 85 
 
 'Of course I am obliging,' groaned tho Major, 'but the most 
 obliging person that ever was can't perform impossibilities. If 
 you want a box at the Kaleidoscope you must engage one for 
 to-morrow month — or to-morrow six weeks. It is a mere 
 bandbox of a theatre, and everybody in London wants to see 
 this farrago of nonsense illustrated by pretty women.' 
 
 ' You have seen it, I suppose 1 ' 
 
 1 Yes, I dropped in one night with an old naval friend 
 who had taken a stall for his wife, which she was not able to 
 occupy.' 
 
 ' Major Bree, you are a very selfish person,' said Christabel, 
 straightening her slim waist, and drawing herself up with mock 
 dignity. ' You have seen this play yourself, and you are artful 
 enough to tell us it is not worth seeing, just to save yourself 
 the trouble of hunting for a box. Uncle Oliver, that is not 
 chivalry. I used to think you were a chivalrous person.' 
 
 'Is there anything improper in the play?' asked Jessie, 
 striking in with her usual bluntness — never afraid to put her 
 thoughts into speech. ' Is that your reason for not wishing 
 L'liri.-4abel to see it 1 ' 
 
 ' No, the piece is perfectly correct,' stammered the Major. 
 : there is not a word ' 
 
 ' Then I think Belle's whim ought to be indulged,' said Jessie, 
 'especially as Mr. Hamleigh's absence makes her feel out of 
 spirits.' 
 
 The Major murmured something vague about the difficulty 
 of getting places with less than six weeks' notice, whereupon 
 Christabel told him, with a dignified air, that he need not 
 trouble himself any further. 
 
 But a young lady who has plenty of money, and who has been 
 accustomed, while dutiful and obedient to her elders, to have 
 her own way in all essentials, is not so easily satisfied as the 
 guileless Major supposed As soon as the West-end shops were 
 open next morning, before the jewellers had set out their 
 dazzling wares — those diamond parures and rivieres, which are 
 always inviting the casual lounger to step in and buy them — 
 those goodly chased claret jugs, and Queen Anne tea-kettles, 
 and mighty venison dishes, which seemed to say, this is an 
 age of luxury, and we are indispensable to a gentleman's table 
 — before those still more attractive shops;which deal in hundred- 
 guinea dressing-cases, jasper inkstands, ormolu paper-weights, 
 lapis lazuli blotting-books, and coral powder-boxes — had laid 
 themselves out for the tempter's work— Miss Courtenay and 
 Miss Bridgman, in their neat morning attire, were tripping from 
 library to library, in quest of a box at the Kaleidoscope for that 
 very evening. 
 
 They found what they wanted in Bond Street. Lady Some*
 
 80 Mount lloynL 
 
 body had sent back her box by a footman, just ten mimite< 
 ago, on account of Lord Somebody's attack of gout. The 
 librarian could have sold it were it fifty boxes, and at a fabulous 
 price, but he virtuously accepted four guineas, which gave him 
 a premium of only one guinea for his trouble — and Christabel 
 ■vent home rejoicing. 
 
 'It will be such fun to show the Major that we are cleverer 
 than he,' she said to Jessie. 
 
 Miss Bridgeman was thoughtful, and made no reply to this 
 remark. She was pondering the Major's conduct in this small 
 matter, and it seemed to her that he must have some hidden 
 reason for wishing Christabel not to see 'Cupid and Psyche.' 
 That he, who had so faithfully waited upon all their fancies, 
 taking infinite trouble to give them pleasure, could in this matter 
 be disobliging or indifferent seemed hardly possible. There 
 must be a reason ; and yet what reason could there be to taboo 
 a piece which the Major distinctly declared to be correct, and 
 which all the fashionable world went to see ? ' Perhaps there- 
 is something wrong with the drainage of the theatre,' Jessie 
 thought, speculating vaguely — a suspicion of typhoid fever, which 
 the Major had shrunk from mentioning, out of respect for 
 feminine nerves. 
 
 ' Did you ever tell Mr. Hamleigh you wanted to see ' Cupid 
 and Psyche ' 1 asked Miss Bridgeman at last, sorely exercised 
 in spirit — fearful lest Christabel was incurring some kind of 
 peril by her persistence. 
 
 ' Yes, I told him ; but it was at a time when we had a good 
 many engagements, and I think he forgot all about it. Hardly 
 like Angus, was it, to forget one's wishes, when he is generally 
 so eager to anticipate them 1 1 
 
 ' A strange coincidence ! ' thought Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh 
 and the Major had been unanimous in their neglect of this 
 particular fancy of Christabel's. 
 
 At luncheon Miss Courtenay told her aunt the whole story — 
 how Major Bree had been most disobliging, and how she had 
 circumvented him. 
 
 ' And my revenge will be to make him sit out ' Cupid and 
 Psyche ' for the second time,' she said, lightly, ' for he must be 
 our escort. You will go, of course, dearest, to please me ? ' 
 
 ' My pet, you know how the heat of a theatre always exhausts 
 me ! ' pleaded Mrs. Tregonell, whose health, long delicate, had 
 been considerably damaged by her duties as chaperon. ' When 
 you are going anywhere with Angus, I like to be seen with you ; 
 but to-night, with the Major and Jessie, I shall not be wanted. 
 1 can enjoy an evening's rest.' 
 
 ' But do you enjoy that long, blank evening, Auntie V asked 
 Christabel, looking anxiously at her aunt's somewhat careworn
 
 Cupid and Psyche. 87 
 
 face. People who have one solitary care make so much of it , 
 nurse and fondle it, as if it were an only child. ' Once or twice 
 when we ha\e let you have your own way and stay at home 
 you have looked so pale and melancholy when we came back, as 
 if you had been brooding upon sad thoughts all the evening.' 
 
 ' Sad thoughts will come, Belle.' 
 
 ' They ought not to come to you, Auntie. What cause have 
 you for sadness ? ' 
 
 ' I have a dear son far away, Belle — don't you think that is 
 cause enough 1 ' 
 
 ' A son who enjoys the wild sports of the "West ever so much 
 better than he enjoys his home ; but who will settle down 
 by-and-by into a model country Squire.' 
 
 ' I doubt that, Christabel. I don't think he will ever settle 
 down — now.' 
 
 There was an emphasis — an almost angry emphasis — upon the 
 last word which told Christabel only too plainly what her aunt 
 meant. She could guess what disappointment it was that her 
 aunt sighed over in the long, lonely evenings ; and, albeit the 
 latent resentfulness in Mrs. Tregonell's mind was an injustice, 
 her niece could not help being sorry for her. 
 
 ' Yes, dearest, he will — he will,' she said, resolutely. ' He 
 will have his fill of shooting bisons, and all manner of big and 
 small game, out younder ; and he will come home, and marry 
 some good sweet girl, who will love you only just a little less 
 than I do, and he will be the last grand example of the old- 
 fashioned country Squire— a race fast dying out ; and he will be 
 as much respected as if the power of the Norman Botterels still 
 ruled in the land, and he had the right of dealing out high-handed 
 justice, and immuring his fellow-creatures in a dungeon under his 
 drawing-room.' 
 
 ' I would rather you would not talk about him,' answered the 
 widow, gloomily ; ' you turn everything into a joke. You forget 
 that in my uncertainty about his fate, every thought of him is 
 fraught with pain.' 
 
 Belle hung her head, and the meal ended in silence. After 
 luncheon came dressing, and then the drive to Twickenham, with 
 Major Bree in attendance. Christabel told him of her success as 
 they drove through the Park to Kensington. 
 
 ' I have the pleasure to invite you to a seat in my box at the 
 Kaleidoscope this evening,' she said. 
 'What box?' 
 
 'A box which Jessie and I secured this morning, before yoa 
 had finished your breakfast.' 
 ' A box for this evening ? ' 
 ' For this evenuig.' 
 ' I wonder you care to go to a theatre without Hamleigh.*
 
 88 Mount Boyal. 
 
 ' It 1*3 very cruel of you to say that!' exclaimed Christabel, 
 her eyes brightening with girlish tears, which her pride checked 
 before they could fall. ' You ought to know that I am wretched 
 without him — and that I want to lose the sense of my misery in 
 dreamland. The theatre for me is what opium was for Coleridge 
 and De Quincey.' 
 
 fc,* I understand,' said Major Bree ; ' "you are not merry, but 
 you do beguile the thing you are by seeming otherwise." ' 
 
 ' You will go with us ? ' 
 
 ' Of course, if Mrs. Tregonell does not object.' 
 
 ' I shall be very grateful to you for taking care of them,' 
 answered the dowager languidly, as she leant back in her carriage 
 — a fine example of handsome middle-age ; gracious, elegant, 
 bearing every murk of good birth, yet with a worn look, as of one 
 for whom fading beauty and decline of strength would come too 
 swiftly. I know [ shall be tired to death when we get back to town.' 
 
 ' I don't think London Society suits you so well as the 
 monotony of Mi. ait Royal,' said Major Bree. 
 
 ' No ; but I am glad Christabel has had her first season. 
 People have been extremely kind. I never thought we should 
 have so many invitations.' 
 
 ' You did not know that beauty is the ace of trumps in the 
 game of society.' 
 
 The garden party was as other parties of the same genus : 
 strawberry ices and iced coffee in a tent under a spreading 
 Spanish chestnut — music and recitations in a drawing-room, with 
 many windows looking upon the bright swift river — and the 
 picturesque x*oofs of Old Richmond — just that one little 
 picturesque group of bridge and old tiled-gables which still 
 remains — fine gowns, fine talk ; a dash of the aesthetic element ; 
 strange colours, strange forms and fashions ; pretty gilds in 
 grandmother bonnets ; elderly women in limp Ophelia gowns, 
 with tumbled frills and lank hair. Christabel and the Major 
 walked about the pretty garden, and criticized all the eccen- 
 tricities, she glad to keep aloof from her many admirers — safe 
 under the wing of a familiar friend. 
 
 ' Five o'clock,' she said ; ' that makes twenty-four hours. Do 
 you think he will be back to-morrow ] ' 
 
 ' He 1 Might I ask whom you mean by that pronoun ? ' 
 
 ' Angus. His telegram this morning said that his aunt was 
 really ill — not in any danger — but still quite an invalid, and that 
 lie would be obliged to stay a little longer than he had hoped 
 might b j needful, in order to cheer her. Do you think he will 
 be able to come back to-morrow ? ' 
 
 ' Hardly, I fear. Twenty -four hours would be a very short 
 time for the cheering process. I think you ought to allow him 
 a week. Did you answer his telegram 1 '
 
 Cupid and Psyche. 89 
 
 'Why, of coarse ! I told him how mite: able I was without 
 him ; but that he must do whatever was right and kind for his 
 aunt. I wrote him a long letter before luncheon to the same 
 effect. But, oh, I hope the dear old lady will get well very 
 quickly ! ' 
 
 ' If usquebaugh can mend her, no doubt the recovery will be 
 rapid,' answered the Major, laughing. 'I daresay that is why 
 you are so anxious for Hamleigh's return. You think if he 
 stays in the North he may become a confirmed toddy-drinker. 
 By the bye, when his return is so uncertain, do you think it is 
 quite safe for you to go to the theatre to-night ? He might come 
 to Bolton Bow during your absence.' 
 
 ' That is hardly possible,' said Christabel. ' But even if such 
 a happy thing should occur, he would come and join us at the 
 Kaleidoscope.' 
 
 This was the Major's last feeble and futile effort to prevent a 
 wilful woman having her own way. They rejoined Mrs. 
 Tregonell, and went back to their carriage almost immediately 
 — were in Bolton Bow in time for a seven o'clock dinner, and 
 were seated in the box at the Kaleidoscope a few minutes after 
 eight. The Kaleidoscope was one of the new theatres which 
 have been added to the attractions of London during the Lo,st 
 twenty years. It was a small house, and of exceeding elegance ; 
 the inspiration of the architect thereof seemingly derived rather 
 from the bonbonnieres of Siraudin and Boissier than from the 
 severer exemplars of high art Somebody said it was a theatre 
 which looked as if it ought to be filled with glace chestnuts, or 
 crystallized violets, rather than with substantial flesh and blood. 
 The draperies thereof were of palest dove-coloured poplin and 
 cream-white satin , the fauteuils were upholstered in velvet of 
 the same dove colour, with a monogram in dead gold ; the 
 pilasters and mouldings were of the slenderest and most delicate 
 order — no heavy masses of gold or colour — all airy, light, grace- 
 ful ; the sweeping curve of the auditorium was in itself a thing 
 of beauty ; every fold of the voluminous dove-coloured curtain, 
 lined with crimson satin — which flashed among the dove tints 
 here and there, like a gleam of vivid colour in the breast of a 
 tropical bird — was a study. The front of the house was lighted 
 with old-fashioned wax candles, a recurrence to obsolete fashion 
 which reminded the few survivors of the D'Orsay period of Her 
 Majesty's in the splendid days of Pasta and Malibran, ami which 
 delighted the Court and Livery of the Tallow Chandlers' 
 Company. 
 
 ' What a lovely theatre ! ' cried Christabel, looking round the 
 house, which was crowded with a brilliant audience ; ' and how 
 cruel of you not to bring us here ! It is the prettiest theatre 
 we have scea yet.'
 
 90 Mount BoyaL 
 
 1 Yes ; it's a nice little place,' said the Major, feebly ; ' but, 
 you see, they've been playing the same piece all the season — no 
 variety.' 
 
 ' What did that matter, when we had not seen the piece ? 
 Besides, a young man I danced with told me he had been to see 
 it fifteen times.' 
 
 ' That young man was an ass ! ' grumbled the Major. 
 
 ' "Well, I can't help thinking so too,' assented Christabel. 
 And then the overture began — a dreamy, classical compound, 
 made up of reminiscences of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber — 
 a melodious patchwork, dignified by scientific orchestration. 
 Christabel listened dreamily to the dreamy music, thinking of 
 Angus all the while — wondering what he was doing in the far- 
 away Scottish land, which she knew only from Sir Walter's 
 novels. 
 
 The dove-coloured curtains were drawn apart to a strain of 
 plaintive sweetness, and the play — half poem, half satire — began. 
 The scene was a palace garden, in some ' unsuspected isle in far-off 
 seas.' The personages were Psyche, her sisters, and the jealous 
 goddess, whose rest had been disturbed by rumours of an 
 earthly beauty which surpassed her own divine charms, and 
 who approached the palace disguised as a crone, dealing in 
 philters and simples, ribbons and perfumes, a kind of female 
 Autolycus. 
 
 First came a dialogue between Yenus and the elder sisters 
 — handsome women both, but of a coarse type of beauty, looking 
 too large for the frame in which they appeared. Christabel and 
 Jessie enjoyed the smartness of the dialogue, which sparkled with 
 A ristophanian hits at the follies of the hour, and yet had a 
 poetical grace which seemed the very flavour of the old Greek 
 world. 
 
 At last, after the interest of the fable had fairly begun, 
 there rose the faint melodious breathings of a strange music 
 within the palace — the quaint and primitive harmonies of a 
 three -stringed lyre — and Psyche came slowly down the marble 
 steps, a slen£or, gracious figure in classic drapery — Canova's 
 statue incarnate. 
 
 'Yery pretty face,' muttered the Major, looking at her 
 through his opera-glass ; ' but no figure.' 
 
 The slim, willowy form, delicately and lightly moulded as a 
 young fawn's, was assuredly of a type widely different from 
 the two young women of the fleshly school who represented 
 Psyche's jealous sisters. In their case there seemed just enough 
 mind to keep those sleek, well-favoured bodies in motion. In 
 Stella Mayne the soul, or, at any rate, an ethereal essence, a 
 vivid beauty of expression, an electric brightness, which passes 
 for the soul, so predominated over the sensual, that it would
 
 Cujnd and Psyche. 91 
 
 have scarcely surprised one if this fragile butterfly-creature 
 had verily spread a pair of filmy wings and floated away into 
 space. The dark liquid eyes, the small chiselled features, 
 exquisitely Greek, were in most perfect harmony with the 
 character. Amongst the substantial sensuous forms of her 
 companions this Psyche moved like a being from the spirit 
 world. 
 
 ' Oh ! ' cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, ' how perfectly 
 lovely ! ' 
 
 'Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?' muttered the Major, 
 tugging at his grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious 
 Psyche from his lurking place at the back of the box. 
 
 ' Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem.' 
 
 Jessie Bridgeman said nothing. She had looked straight 
 from Psyche to the Major, as he grunted out his acqui- 
 escence, and the troubled expression of his face troubled her. 
 It was plain to her all in a moment that his objection to 
 the Kaleidoscope Theatre was really an objection to Psyche. 
 Yet what harm could that lovely being on the stage, even 
 were she the worst and vilest of her sex, do to any one so 
 remote from her orbit as Christabel Courtenay 1 
 
 The play went on. Psyche snoke her graceful lines with a 
 perfect intonation. Nature had in this case not been guilty of 
 cruel inconsistency. The actress's voice was as sweet as her 
 face ; every movement was harmonious ; every look lovely. She 
 was not a startling actress ; nor was there any need of great 
 acting in the part that had been written for her. She was 
 Psyche — the loved, the loving, pursued by jealousy, persecuted 
 by women's unwomanly hatred, afflicted, despairing — yet loving 
 always ; beautiful in every phase of her gentle life. 
 
 ' Do you like the play 1 ' asked the Major, grimly, when the 
 turtain had fallen on the first act. 
 
 ' I never enjoyed anything so much ! It is so different 
 from all other plays we have seen,' said Christabel ; ' and Psyche 
 — Miss Stella Mayne, is she not ? — is the loveliest creature I 
 ever saw in my life.' 
 
 ' You must allow a wide margin for stage make-up, paint 
 and powder, and darkened lashes,' grumbled the Major. 
 
 ' But I have been studying her face through my glass. It 
 is hardly at all made up. Just compare it with th& faces of 
 the two sisters, which are like china plates, badly fired. Jessie, 
 what are you dreaming about ] You haven't a particle of 
 enthusiasm ! Why don't you say something 1 ' 
 
 ' I don't want to be an echo,' said Miss Bridgeman, curtly. 
 ' I could only repeat what you are saying. I can't be original 
 enough to say that Miss Mayne is ugly.' 
 
 ' She is simply the loveliest creature we have seen on the
 
 92 Mount Royal. 
 
 stage or off it,' exclaimed Christabel, who was .,00 rustic to want 
 to know who Miss Mayne was, and where the manager had 
 discovered such a pearl, as a London playgoer might have done. 
 
 ' Hark ! ' said Jessie ; ' there's a knock at the door.' 
 
 Christabel 's heart began to beat violently. Could it be 
 Angus ? No, it was more likely to be some officious person, 
 offering ices. 
 
 It was neither ; but a young man of the languid-elegant 
 type — one of Christabel's devoted admirers, the very youth who 
 had told her of his having seen ' Cupid and Psyche/ fifteen 
 times. 
 
 ' Why this makes the sixteenth time,' she said, smiling at 
 him as they sl>ook hands. 
 
 'I think it is nearer the twentieth,' he replied ; 'it is quite 
 the jolliest piece in London ? Don't you agree with me 1 ' 
 
 1 1 think it is — remarkably — jolly ! ' answered Christabel, 
 laughing. ' What odd words you have in London for the 
 expression of your ideas — and so few of them ! ' 
 
 ' A kind of short-hand,' said the Major, ' arbitrary characters. 
 Jolly means anything you like — awful means anything you like. 
 That kind of language gives the widest scope for the exercise of 
 the imagination.' 
 
 ' How is Mrs. Tregonell V asked the youth, not being given to 
 the discussion of abstract questions, frivolous or solemn. He had 
 a mind which could only grasp life in the concrete — an intellect 
 that required to deal with actualities — people, coats, hats, boots, 
 dinner, park hack — just as little children require actual counters 
 to calculate with. 
 
 He subsided into a chair behind Miss Courtenay, and the 
 box being a large one, remained there for the rest of the play — ■ 
 to the despair of a companion youth in the stalls, who looked up 
 ever and anon, vacuous and wondering, and who resembled his 
 fi-knd as closely as a well-matched carriage-horse resembles his 
 fellow — grooming and action precisely similar. 
 
 ' What brilliant diamonds! ' said Christabel, noticing a collet 
 necklace which Psyche wore in the second act, and which was a 
 good deal out of harmony with her Greek drapery — not by any 
 means resembling those simple golden ornaments which patient 
 Dr. Schliemann and his wife dug out of the hill at Hissarlik. 
 ' But, of course, they are only stage jewels,' continued Christabel ; 
 ' yet they sparkle as brilliantly as diamonds of the first water.' 
 
 ' Very odd, but so they do,' muttered young FitzPelham, 
 behind her shoulder ; and then, sotto voce to the Major, he said 
 — ' that's the worst of giving these women jewels, they will wear 
 them.' 
 
 ' And that emerald butterfly on her shoulder/ pursued 
 Christabel ; ' one would suppose it were real.'
 
 Cupid and Psych.6. ^3 
 
 « A real butterfly ? ' 
 
 1 jSTo, real emeralds.' 
 
 ' It belonged to the Empress of the French, and was sold for 
 three hundred and eighty guineas at Christie's,' said Fitz- 
 Pelham ; whereupon Major Bree's substantial boot came down 
 heavily on the youth's Queen Anne shoe. 'At least, the 
 Empress had one like it,' stammered FitzPelham, saying to him- 
 self, in his own vernacular, that he had ' hoofed it.' 
 
 ' How do you like Stella Mayne ?' he asked by-and-by, when 
 the act was over. 
 
 ' I am charmed with her. She is the sweetest actress I ever 
 paw ; not the greatest — there are two or three who far surpass 
 her in genius ; but there is a sweetness — a fascination. I don't 
 wonder she is the rage. I only wonder Major Bree could have 
 deprived me of the pleasure of seeing her all this time.' 
 
 ' You could stand the piece a second time, couldn't you ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly— or a third time. It is so poetical— it carries one 
 into a new world !' 
 
 'Pretty foot and ankle, hasn't she?' murmured FitzPelham— 
 to which frivolous comment Miss Courtenay made no reply. 
 
 Her soid was rapt in the scene before her — the mystic wood 
 whither Psyche had now wandered with her divine lover. The 
 darkness of a summer night in the Greek Archipelago — fire-flies 
 flitting athwart ilex and olive Lushes — a glimpse of the distant 
 starlit sea. 
 
 Here — goaded by her jealous sisters to a fatal curiosity — 
 Psyche stole with her lamp to the couch of her sleeping lover, 
 gazing spell-bound upon that godlike countenance — represented 
 in actual flesh by a chubby round face and round brown eyes — 
 and in her glad s\irprise letting fall a drop of oil from her lamp 
 on Cupid's winged shoulder — whereon the god leaves her, 
 wounded by her want of faith. Had he not told her they 
 must meet only in the darkness, and that she must never seek 
 to 1 now his name? So ends the second act of the fairy drama. 
 In the third, poor Psyche is in ignoble bondage — a slave to 
 Venus, in the goddess's Palace at Cythera — a fashionable, fine- 
 lady Venus, who leads her gentle handmaiden a sorry life, till 
 the god of love comes to her rescue. And here, in the tiring 
 chamber of the goddess, the playwright makes sport of all the 
 arts by which modern beauty is manufactured. Here poor 
 Psyche — tearful, despairing — has to toil at the creation of the 
 Queen of Beauty, whose charms of face and figure are discover! d 
 to be all falsehood, from the topmost curl of her toupet to the 
 p under her jewelled buskin. Throughout this scene 
 Psyche i is between smiles and tears; and then at the 
 
 last Cupid appears — claims his mistress, defies his mother, and 
 the happy lovers, linked in q-m-}\ other's arms, float sky-ward on
 
 f)4 Mount Royal. 
 
 a shaft of lime-light. Arid so the graceful mythic drama ends — 
 fanciful from the first line to the last, gay and lightly touched aa 
 burlesque, yet with an element of poetry which burlesque for the 
 most part lacks. 
 
 Christabel's interest had been maintained throughout the 
 performance. 
 
 ' How extraordinarily silent you have been all the evening, 
 Jessie ! ' she said, as they were putting on their cloaks ; ' surely, 
 you like the play ! ' 
 
 ' I like it pretty well. It is rather thin, I think ; but then 
 perhaps, that is because I have ' Twelfth Night ' still in my 
 memory, as we heard Mr. Brandram recite it last week at 
 Willis's Rooms.' 
 
 ' Nobody expects modern comedy to be as good as Shake- 
 speare,' retorted Christabel ; ' you might as well rind fault with 
 the electric light for not being quite equal to the moon. Don't 
 you admire that exquisite creature 1 ' 
 
 ' Which of them 1 ' asked Jessie, stolidly, buttoning her cloak. 
 
 ' Which of them ! Oh, Jessie, you have generally such good 
 taste. VVhy, Miss Mayne, of course. It is almost painful to 
 look at the others. They are such common earthy creatures, 
 compared with her ! ' 
 
 ' I have no doubt she is very wonderful — and she is the 
 fashion, which goes for a great deal,' answered Miss Bridgeman ; 
 but never a word in praise of Stella Mayne could Christabel 
 extort from her. She — who, educated by Shepherd's Bush and 
 poverty, was much more advanced in knowledge of evil than the 
 maiden from beyond Tamar — suspected that some sinister in- 
 fluence was to be feared in Stella Mayne. Why else had the 
 Major so doggedly opposed their visit to this particular theatre ? 
 Why else did he look so glum when Stella Mayne was spoken 
 about ? 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LE SECRET DE POLICHINELLE. 
 
 f he next day but one was Thursday — an afternoon upon which 
 Mrs. Tregonell was in the habit of staying at home to receive 
 callers, and a day on which her small drawing-rooms were 
 generally filled with more or less pleasant people — chiefly of the 
 fairer sex — from four to six. The three rooms — small by degrees 
 and beautifully less — the old-fashioned furniture and profusion 
 of choicest flower's — lent themselves admirably to gossip and 
 afternoon tea, and were even conducive to mild flirtation, for 
 there was generally a sprinkling of young men of the PitzPolhare
 
 he Secret de Polichinelle. 95 
 
 type— having nothing particular to say, but always faultless in 
 their dress, and well-meaning as to their manners. 
 
 On this afternoon — which to Christabel seemed a day of 
 duller hue and colder atmosphere than all previous Thursdays, 
 on account of Angus Hamleigh's absence— there were rather 
 more callers than usual. The season was ripening towards its 
 close. Some few came to pay their last visit, and to inform Mrs. 
 Tregonell and her niece about their holiday movements- 
 general] v towards the Engadine or some German Spa— the one 
 spot of earth to which their constitution could accommodate 
 itself at this time of year. 
 
 ' I am obliged to go to Pontresina before the end of July, 1 
 said a ponderous middle-aged matron to Miss Courtenay. ' I 
 can't breathe anywhere else in August and September.' 
 
 ' I think you would find plenty of air at Boscastle,' said 
 Christabel, smiling at her earnestness ; ' but I dare say the 
 Engadine is very nice ! ' 
 
 ' Five thousand feet above the level of the sea,' said the 
 matron, proudly. 
 
 ' I like to be a little nearer the sea — to see it — and smell 
 it — and feel its spray upon my face,' answered Christabel. 
 ' Do you take your children with you ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, no, they all go to Eamsgate with the governess and a maid.' 
 
 ' Poor little things ! And how sad for you to know that 
 there are all those mountain passes — a three days' journey — 
 between you and your children!' 
 
 ' Yes, it is very trying ! ' sighed the mother ; ' but they 
 are so fond of Eamsgate ; and the Engadine is the only place 
 that suits me.' 
 
 ' You have never been to Chagford ? ' 
 
 ' Chagford ! No ; what is Chagford ? ' 
 
 ' A village upon the edge of Dartmoor — all among the 
 Devonshire hills. People go there for the fine bracing air. I 
 can't help thinking it must do them almost as much good as 
 the Engadine.' 
 
 ' Indeed ! I have heard that Devonshire is quite tco 
 lovely,' said the matron, who would have despised herself had 
 
 • been familiar with her native land. 'But what have you 
 
 ie with Mr. Ilamleigh ? I am quite disappointed at not 
 him this afternoon.' 
 
 'He is in Scotland,' said Christabel, and then went onto tell as 
 much as wasnecessary about her lover's journey to the North. 
 
 'How [fully dull you must be without him !' said the 
 
 lady, betically, and several other ladies — notably a 
 
 baronefa widow, who had been a friend of Mrs. Tregonell's 
 girlhood — a woman who never said a kind word of anybody, 
 yet was invited everywhere, and who had the reputation of
 
 OG Sfount Royal. 
 
 giving a belter dinner, on a small scale, than any other lonely 
 women in Loudon. The rest were young women, mostly of the 
 gushing type, who were prepared to worship Christabel because she 
 was pretty, an heiress, and engaged to a man of some distinction 
 in their particular world. They had all clustered round Mrs. 
 Tregonell and her niece, in the airy front drawing-room, while 
 Miss Bridgeman poured out tea at a Japanese table in the middle 
 room, waited upon sedulously by Major Bree, Mr. FitzPelham 
 and another youth, a Somerset House young man, who wrote 
 for the Society papers — or believed that he did, on the strength 
 of* having had an essay on ' Tame Cats ' accepted in the big 
 gooseberry season— and gave himself to the world as a person 
 familiar with the undercurrents of literary and dramatic life. 
 The ladies made a circle round Mrs. Tregonell, and these three 
 gentlemen, circulaiing with tea-cups, sugar-basins, and cream- 
 pots, joined spasmodically in the conversation. 
 
 Christabel owned to finding a certain emptiness in life 
 without her lover. She did not parade her devotion to him, 
 but was much too unaffected to pretend indifference. 
 
 ' We went to the theatre on Tuesday night,' she said. 
 
 ' Oh, how could you ! ' cried the oldest and most gushing 
 of the three young ladies. ' Without Mr. Hamleigh ? ' 
 
 ' That was our chief reason for going. We knew we should 
 be dull without him. We went to the Kaleidoscope, and were 
 delighted with Psyche.' 
 
 All three young ladies gushed in chorus. Stella* Mayne was 
 quite too lovely — a poem, a revelation, and so on, and so on 
 Lady Cumberbridge, the baronet's widow, pursed her lips and 
 elevated her eyebrows, w T hich, on a somewhat modified form, 
 resembled Lord Thin-low's, but said nothing. The Somerset 
 House young man stole a glance at Fitz-Pelham, and smiled 
 meaningly ; but the amiable Fitz-Pelham was oidy vacuous. 
 
 ' Of course you have seen this play,' said Mrs. Tregonell 
 turning to Lady Cumberbridge. ' You see everything, I know r < ' 
 
 ' Yes ; I make it my business to see everything — good, bad, 
 and indifferent,' answered the strong-minded dowager, in a 
 voice which would hardly have shamed the Lord Chancellor's 
 wig, which those Thurlow-like eyebrows so curiously suggested. 
 ' It is the sole condition upon which London life is worth living. 
 If one only saw the good things, one would spend most of 
 one's evening at home, and we don't leave our country 
 places for that. I see a good deal that bores me, an immensa 
 deal that disgusts me, and a little — a very little — that I can 
 honestly admire.' 
 
 'Then I am sure you must admire " Cupid and Psyche," ' 
 said Christabel. 
 
 ' My dear, that piece, which I am told has brought a
 
 Le Secret de Policlrinelle, 97 
 
 fortune to the management, is just one of the things that I 
 don't care to talk ahout before young people. I look upon it 
 as the triumph of vice : and I wonder — yes, very much wonder 
 — that you were allowed to see it.' 
 
 There was an awfulness about the dowager's tone as she 
 uttered these final sentences, which out-Thurlowed Thurlow. 
 Christabel shivered, hardly knowing why, but heartily wishing 
 there had been no such person as Lady Cumberbridge among 
 her aunt's London acquaintance. 
 
 ' But, surely there is nothing improper in the play, dear 
 Lady Cumberbridge,' exclaimed the eldest gusher, too long in 
 society to shrink from sifting any question of that kind. 
 
 1 There is a great deal that is improper,' replied the 
 dowager, sternly. 
 
 ' Surely not in the language : that is too lovely ? ' urged the 
 gusher. ' I must be very dense, I'm afraid, for I really did noi 
 6ee anything objectionable.' 
 
 ' You must be very blind as well as dense, if you didn't 
 Bee Stella Mayne's diamonds,' retorted the dowager. 
 
 ' Oh, of course I saw the diamonds. One could not help 
 seeing them.' 
 
 'And do you think there is nothing improper in those 
 diamonds, or their history?' demanded Lady Cumberbridge, 
 glaring at the damsel from under those terrific eyebrows. 
 ' If so, you must be less experienced in the ways of the world 
 than I gave you credit for being. But I think I said before 
 that this is a question which I do not care to discuss before 
 young people — even advanced as young people are in their 
 ways and opinions now-a-days.' 
 
 The maiden blushed at this reproof ; and the conversation, 
 steered judiciously by Mrs. Tregonell, glided on to safer topics. 
 Yet calmly as that lady bore herself, and carefully as she 
 managed to keep the talk among pleasant ways for the next 
 half-hour, her mind was troubled not a little by the things that 
 had been said about Stella Mayne. There had been a curious 
 significance in the dowager's tone when she expressed surprise 
 at Christabel having been allowed to see this play. That 
 significant tone, in conjunction with Major Bree's marked 
 opposition to Belle's wish upon this one matter, argued that 
 there was some special reason why Belle should not see this 
 actress. Mrs. Tregonell, like all quiet people, very observant, 
 had seen the Somerset House young man's meaning smile as the 
 play was mentioned. What was this peculiar something which 
 all these people had in their minds, and of which she, Christabel'a 
 aunt, to whom the girl's welfare and happiness were vital, kn«-a 
 nothing ? 
 
 She determined to take the most immediate and dir<J<A 
 
 u
 
 98 Mount Royal. 
 
 way of knowing all that was to be known, by questioning that 
 peripatetic ehronicle of fashionable scandal, Lady Cumberbridge. 
 This popular personage knew a great deal more than the Society 
 papers, and was not constrained like those prints to disguise her 
 knowledge in Delphic hints and dark sayings. Lady Cumber- 
 bridge, like John Knox, never feared the face of man, and could 
 be as plain-spoken and as coarse as she pleased. 
 
 ' I should so like to have a few words with you by-and-by, 
 if you don't mind waiting till these girls are gone,' murmured 
 Mrs. Tregonell. 
 
 ' Very well, my dear ; get rid of them as soon as you can, for 
 I've some people coming to dinner, and I want an hour's sleep 
 before I put on my gown.' 
 
 The little assembly dispersed within the next quarter of an 
 hour, and Christabel joined Jessie in the smaller drawing- 
 room. 
 
 1 Yon can shut the folding-doors, Belle,' said Mrs. Tregonell, 
 carelessly. 'You and Jessie are sure to be chattering; and I 
 want a quiet talk with Lady Cumberbridge.' 
 
 Christabel obeyed, wondering a little what the quiet talk 
 would be about, and whether by any chance it would touch 
 upon the play last night. She, too, had been struck by the 
 significance of the dowager's tone ; and then it was so rarely 
 that she found herself excluded from any conversation in which 
 her aunt had part. 
 
 ' Now,' said Mrs. Tregonell, directly the doors were shut, ' I 
 want to know why Christabel should not have been allowed to 
 «ee that play the other night '? ' 
 
 ' What ! ' cried Lady Cumberbridge, ' don't you know why '? ' 
 
 ' Indeed, no. I did not go with them, so I had no oppor- 
 tunity of judging as to the play.' 
 
 'My dear soul,' exclaimed the deep voice of the dowager, 
 • it is not the play — the play is well enough — it is the woman 1 
 And do you really mean to tell me that you don't know 1 ' 
 
 ' That I don't know what 1 ' 
 
 ' Stella Mayne's history '? ' 
 
 ' What should I know of her more than of any other actress ) 
 They are all the same to me, like pictures, which I admire or 
 not, from the outside. I am told that some are women of 
 fashion who go everywhere, r and that it is a privilege to know 
 them ; and that some one ought hardly to speak about, though 
 one may go to see them , while there are others ' 
 
 'Who hover like stars between two worlds,' said Lady 
 Cumberbridge. ' Yes, that's all true. And nobody has told 
 you anything about Stella Mayne ? ' 
 
 ' No one ! ' 
 
 'Then I'm very sorry I mentioned her to you. I dare
 
 Lb Secret de Polichinelle. 00 
 
 say you will hate rue if I tell you the truth : people .always do ; 
 use, in point of fact, truth is generally hateful. "We can't 
 afford to live up to it.' 
 
 ' I shall he grateful to you if you will tell me all that there 
 is to be told about this actress, who seems in some way to be 
 concerned ' 
 
 ' In your' niece's happiness ? "Well, no, my dear, we will 
 hope not. It is all a thing of the past. Your friends have been 
 remarkably discreet. It is really extraordinary that you should 
 have heard nothing about it ; but, on reflection, I think it is 
 really better you should know the fact. Stella Mayne is the 
 young woman for whom Mr. Hamleigh nearly ruined himself 
 three years ago.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell turned white as death. 
 
 Her mind had not been educated to the acceptance of sin 
 and folly as a natural element in a young man's life. In her 
 view of mankind the good men were all Bayards — fearless, 
 stainless ; the bad were a race apart, to be shunned by all good 
 women. To be told that her niece's future husband — the man 
 for whose sake her whole scheme of life had been set aside, the 
 man whom (Jhristabel and she had so implicitly trusted — was a 
 fashionable libertine— the lover of an actress — the talk of the 
 town — was a revelation that changed the whole colour of life. 
 
 ' Are you sure that this is true ? ' she asked falteringly. 
 
 ' My dear creature, do I ever say anything that isn't true 1 
 There is no need to invent things. God knows the things people 
 do are bad enough, and wild enough, to supply conversation 
 for everybody. But this about Hamleigh and Stella Mayne is 
 as well known as the Albert Memorial. He was positively 
 infatuated about her ; took her off the stage : she was in the 
 back row of the ballet at Draty Lane, salary seventeen and 
 sixpence a week. He lived with her in Italy for a year ; 
 then they came back to England, and he gave her a house in 
 St. John's Wood ; squandered his money upon her ; had her 
 educated ; worshipped her, in fact ; and, I am told, would have 
 married her. if she had only behaved herself. Fortunately, these 
 women never do behave themselves : they show the cloven-foot 
 too soon ; our people only go wrong after marriage. But I hope, 
 my dear, you will not allow yourself to be worried by this 
 business. It is all a thing of the past, and Hamleigh will make 
 just as good a husband as if it had never happened ; better, 
 perhaps, for he will be all the more able to appreciate a pure- 
 minded girl like your niece.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell listened with a stony visage. She was 
 thinking of Leonard — Leonard who had never done wrong, in 
 this way, within his mother's knowledge — who had been cheated 
 out of his future wife by a flashy trickster— a man who talked
 
 100 Mount Boy at 
 
 like a poet, and who yet had given his first passionate love, and 
 the best and brightest years of his lif e to a stage-dancer. 
 
 ' How long is it since Mr. Hamleigh has ceased to be devoted 
 to Miss Mayne 1 ' she asked, in a cold, dull voice. 
 
 ' I cannot say exactly : one hears so many different stories ; 
 there were paragraphs in the Society papers last season : ' A 
 certain voting sprig of fashion, a general favourite, whose infatua- 
 tion foi a well-known actress has been a matter of regret among 
 the haute vole'e, is said to have broken his bonds. The lady keeps 
 her diamonds, and threatens to publish his letters,' and so on, 
 and so forth. You know the kind of thing?' 
 
 ' I do not,' said Mrs. Tregonell. ' I have never taken any 
 interest in such paragraphs.' 
 
 ' Ah ! that is the consequence of vegetating at the fag-end of 
 England : all the pungency is taken out of life for you.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell asked no further questions. She had made 
 up her mind that anymore detailed information, which she might 
 require, must be obtained from another channel. She did not 
 want this battered woman of the world to know how hard sho 
 was hit. Yes — albeit there was a far-off gleam of light amidst 
 this darkness — she was profoundly hurt by the knowledge of 
 Angus Hamleigh's wrong-doing. He had made himself very 
 dear to her — dear from the tender association of the past — dear 
 for his own sake. She had believed him a man of scrupulous 
 honour, of pure and spotless life. Perhaps she had taken all this 
 for granted, in her rustic simplicity, seeing that all his ideas and 
 instincts were those of a gentleman. She had made no allowance 
 for the fact that the will-o'-the-wisp, passionate love, may lure 
 even a gentleman into swampy ground ; and that his sole 
 superiority over profligates of coarser clay will be to behave 
 himself like a gentleman in those morasses whither an errant 
 fancy has beguiled him. 
 
 ' I hope you will not let this influence your feelings towards 
 Mr. Hamleigh,' said Lady Cumberbridge ; ' if you did so, I should 
 really feel sorry for having told you. But you must inevitably 
 have heard the story from somebody else before long.' 
 
 ' No doubt. I suppose everybody knows it.' 
 
 ' Why yes, it was tolerably notorious. They used to be seen 
 everywhere together. Mr. Hamleigh seemed proud of his in- 
 fatuation, and there were plenty of men in his own set to 
 moon rage him. Modern society has adopted Danton's motto, 
 don't you know 1 — de Vaudace, encore de Vaudace et toujours de 
 V and ace! And now I must go and get my siesta, or I shall be 
 as stupid as an owl all the evening. Good-bye.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell sat like a statue, absorbed in thought, for a 
 considerable time after Lady Cumberbridge's departure. What 
 was she to do 1 This horrid story was true, no doubt. Major
 
 Le Secret de PolicJiinelh. 101 
 
 Bree would be able to confirm it presently, when he came back 
 to dinner, as he had promised to come. What was she to do 1 
 Allow the engagement to go on ?— allow an innocent and pure- 
 minded girl to inarry a man whose infatuation for an actress had 
 been town talk ; who had come to Mount Royal fresh from that 
 evd association — wounded to the core, perhaps, by the base 
 creature's infidelity — and seeking consolation wherever it might 
 offer ; bringing his second-hand feelings, with all the bloom worn 
 off them, to the shrine of innocent young beauty ! — dedicating 
 the mere ashes of burned-out fires to the woman who was to be 
 his wife ; perhaps even making scornful comparisons between 
 her simple rustic charme and the educated fascinations of the 
 actress ; bringing her the leavings of a life — the mere dregs of 
 youth's wine-cup ! "Was Christabel to be permitted to continue 
 under this shameful delusion— to believe that she was receiving 
 all when she was getting nothing ? No !— ten thousand times, 
 no ! It was womanhood's stern duty to come to the rescue of 
 guileless, too-trusting girlhood. Bitter as the ordeal must needs 
 be for both, Christabel must be told the whole cruel truth. Then 
 it would be for her own heart to decide. She would still be a 
 free agent. But surely her own pvnity of feeling would teach 
 her to decide rightly — to renounce the lover who had so fooled 
 and cheated her — and, perhaps, later to reward the devotion of 
 that other adorer who had loved her from boyhood upwards with 
 a steady unwavering affection — chiefly demonstrated by the calm 
 self-assured manner in which he had written of Christabel — in 
 his letters to his mother— as his future wife, the possibility of 
 her rejection of that honour never having occurred to his rustic 
 intelligence. 
 
 Christabel peeped in through the half-opened door. 
 
 ' Well, A unt Di, is your conference over ? Has her ladyship 
 gone ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, dear ; I am trying to coax myself to sleep,' answered 
 Mrs. Tregonell from the depths of her arm-chair. 
 
 ' Then I'll go and dress for dinner. Ah, how I only wish 
 there were a chance of Angus coming back to-night ! ' sighed 
 Christabel, softly closing the door. 
 
 Major Bree came in ten minutes afterwards. 
 
 ' Come here, and sit by my side,' said Mrs. Tregonell. ' I 
 want to talk to you seriously.' 
 
 The Major complied, feeling far from easy in his mind. 
 
 ' How pale you look ! ' he said ; ' is there anything wrong ? ' 
 
 ' Yes — everything is wrong ! You have treated me very 
 badly. You have been false to me and to Christabel ! ' 
 
 ' That is rather a wide accusation,' said the Major, calmlj 
 He knew perfectly well what was coming, and that he should 
 require all his patience — all that sweetness of temper which ha</
 
 102 Mount Boyal. 
 
 been Lis distinction through life — in order to leaven the widow's 
 wrath against the absent. ' Perhaps, you won't think it too 
 much trouble to explain the exact nature of my offence?' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell told hirn Lady Cumberbridge's story. 
 
 ' Did you, or did you not, know this last October 1 ' she 
 asked. 
 
 ' I had heard something about it when I was in London two 
 years before.' 
 
 ' And you did not consider it your duty to tell me 1 ' 
 
 ' Certainly not. I told you at the time, when I came back 
 from town, that your young protegees life had been a trine wild. 
 Miss Bridgeman remembered the fact, and spoke of it the night 
 Ifamleigh came to Mount Royal. When I saw how matters 
 were going with Belle and Hamleigh, I made it my business to 
 question him, considering myself Belle's next friend ; and he 
 assured me, as between man and man, that the affair with Stella 
 Mayne was over — that he had broken with her formally and 
 iinally. From first to last I believe he acted wonderfully well 
 in the business.' 
 
 ' Acted well ? — acted well, to be the avowed lover of such a 
 woman ! — to advertise his devotion to hex 1 — associate his name 
 with hers irrevocably — for you know that the world never for- 
 gets these alliances — and then to come to Mount Boyal, and 
 practise upon our provincial ignorance, and offer his battered 
 life to my niece ? Was that well 1 ' 
 
 You could hardly wish him to have told your niece the 
 whole story. Besides, it is a thing of the past. No man can go 
 through life with the burden of his youtliful follies hanging 
 round his neck, and strangling him.' 
 
 ' The past is as much a part of a man's life as the present. I 
 want my niece's husband to be a man of an unstained past.' 
 
 ' Then you will have to wait a long time for him. My dear 
 Mrs. Tregonell, pray be reasonable, just commonly reasonable \ 
 There is not a family in England into which Angus Hamleigh 
 would not be received with open arms, if he offered himself as 
 a suitor. Why should you draw a hard-and-fast line, sacrifice 
 Belle's happiness to a chimerical idea of manly virtue 1 You 
 cantf have King Arthur for your niece's husband, and if you 
 could, perhaps you wouldn't care about him. Why not be 
 content with Lancelot, who has sinned, and is sorry for his sin ; 
 and of whom may be spoken praise almost as noble as those 
 famous words Sir Bohort spoke over his friend's dead body.' 
 
 ' I shall not sacrifice Belle's happiness. If she were my 
 daughter I should take upon myself to judge for her, and while 
 I lived she should never see Angus Hamleigh's face again. But 
 she is my sister's child, and I shall give her the liberty of 
 judgment'
 
 Le Secret de PolichineUe. 103 
 
 'You don't mean that you will tell her this story f ' 
 Most decidedly.' 
 
 ' For God's sake, don't ! — you will spoil her happiness for 
 ever. To you and me, who must have some knowledge of 
 the world, it ought to be a small thing that a man has made 
 a fool of himself about an actress. We ought to know for 
 how little that kind of folly counts in a lifetime. But for a girl 
 brought up like Christabel it will mean disenchantment — doubt 
 — perhaps a lifetime of jealousy and self-torment. For mer 
 sake, be reasonable in this matter ! I am talking to you as it I 
 were ChristabePs father, remember. I suppose that old harridan, 
 Lady Cumberbridge, told you this precious story. Such women 
 ought to be put down by Act of Parliament. Yes, there should 
 be a law restricting every unattached female over five-and-forty 
 to a twenty-mile radius of her country-house. After that age 
 their tongues are dangerous.' 
 
 'My friend Lady Cumberbridge told me facts which seem 
 to be within everybody's knowledge ; and she told them at 
 my particular request. Your rudeness about her does not make 
 the case any better for Mr. Hamleigh, or for you.' 
 
 ' I think I had better go and dine at my club,' said the Major, 
 perfectly placid. 
 
 ' No, stay, please. You have proved yourself a broken 
 reed to lean upon ; but still you are a reed.' 
 
 ' If I stay it will be to persuade you to spare Belle the 
 knowledge of this wretched story.' 
 
 'I suppose he has almost ruined himself for the creature,' 
 said Mrs. Tregonell, glancing at the subject for the first time 
 from a practical point of view. 
 
 ' He spent a good many thousands, but as he had no 
 other vices — did not race or gamble— his fortune survived the 
 shock. His long majority allowed for considerable accumulations, 
 you see. He began life with a handsome capital in hand. I 
 dare say Miss Mayne sweated that down for him ! ' 
 
 ' I don't want to go into details — I only want to know 
 how far he deceived us ?' 
 
 ' There was no deception as to his means — which are ample — 
 nor as to the fact that he is entirely free from the entanglement we 
 have been talking about. Every one in London knows that the 
 affair was over and done with more than a year ago.' 
 
 The two girls came down to the drawing-room, and dinner 
 was announced. It was a very dismal dinner — the dreariest that 
 had ever been eaten in that house, Christabel thought. Mrs. 
 Tregonell was absorbed in her own thoughts, absent, automatic 
 in all she said and did. The Major maintained a forced hilarity, 
 which was more painful than silence. Jessie looked anxious. 
 
 ' I'll tell you what, girln,' said Major Bree, as the mournful
 
 104 Mount Royal. 
 
 meal languished towards its melancholy close, ( we seem all very 
 doleful without Harnleigh. I'll run round to Bond Street directly 
 after dinner, and see if I can get three stalls for " Lohengrin." 
 They are often to be had at the last moment.' 
 
 ' Please don't,' said Christabel, earnestly ; ' I would not go to 
 a theatre again without Angus. I am sorry I went the other 
 night. It was obstinate and foolish of me to insist upon seeing 
 that play, and I was punished for it by that horrid old woman 
 this afternoon.' 
 
 ' But you liked the play 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes — while I was seeing it ; but now I have taken a dislike 
 to Miss Mayne. I feel as if I had seen a snake — all grace and 
 lovely colour — and had caught hold of it, only to find that it was 
 a snake.' 
 
 The Major stared and looked alarmed. "Was this an example 
 of instinct superior to reason ? 
 
 ' Let me try for the opera,' he said. ' I'm sure it would do 
 you good to go. You will sit in the front dra wing-room listening 
 for hansoms all the evening, fancying that every pair of wheels 
 you hear is bringing Angus back to you.' 
 
 ' I would rather be doing that than be sitting at the opera, 
 thinking of him. But I'm afraid there's no chance of his coming 
 to-night. His letter to-day told me that his aunt insists upon 
 his staying two or three days longer, and that she is ill enough to 
 make him anxious to oblige her. 
 
 The evening passed in placid dreariness. Mrs. Tregonell sat 
 brooding in her arm-chair — pondering whether she should or 
 should not tell Christabel everything — knowing but too well how 
 the girl's happiness was dependent upon her undisturbed belief 
 in her lover, yet repeating to herself again and again that it was 
 right and fair that Christabel should know the truth — nay, ever 
 so much better that she should be told it now, when she was still 
 free to shape her own future, than that she should make the dis- 
 covery later, when she was Angus Hamleigh's wife. This last 
 consideration — the thought, that a secret which was everybody's 
 secret must inevitably, sooner or later, become known to 
 Christabel — weighed heavily with Mrs. Tregonell ; and through 
 all her meditations there was interwoven the thought of her 
 absent son, and how his future welfare might depend upon the 
 course to be taken now. 
 
 Christabel played and sang, while the Major and Jessie 
 Bridgeman sat at bezique. The friendship of these two had 
 been in no wise disturbed by the Major's offer, and the lady's 
 rejection. It was the habit of both to take life pleasantly. 
 Jessie took pains to show the Major how sincerely she valued 
 his esteem — how completely she appreciated the fine points of 
 his character ; and he was too much a gentleman to remind her
 
 Le Secret de Polichinelle. 105 
 
 by one word or tone of his disappointment that day in the wood 
 above Maidenhead. 
 
 The evening came to its quiet end at last. Christabel had 
 scarcely left her piano in the dim little third room— she had sat 
 there in the faint light, playing slow sleepy nocturnes and lieder, 
 and musing, musing sadly, with a faint sick dread of coming 
 sorrow. She had seen it in her aunt's face. When the old buhl 
 elock chimed the half-hour after ten the Major got up and took 
 his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he pressed her hand at 
 I Girting to murmur : ' Remember,' with an accent as solemn as 
 Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon. 
 
 Mis. Tregonell answered never a word. She had been pon- 
 dering and wavering all the evening, but had come to no fixed 
 conclusion. 
 
 She bade the two girls good-night directly the Major was 
 gone. She told herself that she had the long tranquil night 
 before her for the resolution of her doubts. She would sleep 
 upon this vexed question. But before she had been ten minutes 
 in her room there came a gentle knock at the door, and Christabel 
 stole softly to her side. 
 
 1 Auntie, dear, I want to talk to you before you go to bed, if 
 you are not very tired. May Dormer go for a little while ? ' 
 
 Dormer, gravest and most discreet of handmaids, whose 
 name seemed to have been made on purpose for her, looked at 
 her mistress, and receiving a little nod, took up her work and crept 
 away. Donner was never seen without her needlework. She 
 complained that there was so little to do for Mrs. Tregonell that 
 uidess she had plenty of plain sewing she must expire for want 
 i»f Occupation, having long outlived such frivolity as sweethearts 
 and afternoons out. 
 
 When Dormer was gone, Christabel came to her aunt's chair, 
 and knelt down beside it, just as she had done at Mount Royal, 
 when she told her of Angus Hamleigh's offer. 
 
 ' Aunt Diana, what has happened, what is wrong ? ' she 
 asked, coming at the heart of the question at once. There was 
 no shadow of doubt in her mind that something was sorely 
 amiss. 
 
 ' How do you know that there is anything wrong ] ' 
 
 ' I have known it ever since that horrible old woman — 
 Medusa in a bonnet all over flowers — pansies instead of snakes 
 — talked about Cupid and Psyche. And you knew it, and made 
 her stop to tell you all about it. There is some cruel mystery— 
 something that involves my fate with that of the actress I saw 
 the other night.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell sat with her hands tightly clasped, her brow* 
 bent. She felt herself taken by storm, as it were, surprised intt 
 decision before she had time to make up her mind.
 
 106 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' Since you know so much, perhaps you had better know all,' 
 she said, gloomily ; and then she told the story, shaping it aa 
 delicately as she could for a girl's ear. 
 
 Christabel covered her face with her clasped hands, and 
 listened without a sigh or a tear. The pain she felt was too 
 dull and vague as yet for the relief of tears. The horrible 
 surprise, the sudden darkening of the dream of her young life, the 
 clouding over of every hope, these were shapeless horrors which 
 she could hardly realize at first. Little by little this serpent 
 would unfold its coils ; drop by drop this poison would steal 
 through her veins, until its venom filled her heart. He, whom 
 she had supposed all her own, with whose every thought she 
 had fancied herself familiar, he, of whose heart she had believed 
 herself the sole and sovereign mistress, had been one little year 
 ago the slave of another — loving with so passionate a love that 
 he had not shrunk from letting all the world know his idolatry. 
 Yes, all those people who had smiled at her, and said sw-eet 
 things to her, and congratulated her on her engagement, had 
 known all the while that this lover, of whom she was so proud, 
 was only the cast-off idolator of an actress ; had come to her 
 only when life's master-passion was worn threadbare, and had 
 become a stale and common thing for him. At the first, 
 womanly pride felt the blow as keenly as womanly love. To 
 be made a mock of by the man she had so loved ! 
 
 Kneeling there in dumb misery at her aunt's feet, answering 
 never a word to that wretched record of her lover's folly, 
 Christabel's thoughts flew back to that still grey autumn noontide 
 at Pentargon Bay, and the words then spoken. Words, which 
 then had only vaguest meaning, now rose out of the dim:i sss 
 of the past, and stood up in her mind as if they had been living 
 creatures. He had compared himself to Tristran — to one who 
 had sinned and repented — he had spoken of himself as a man 
 whose life had been more than half-lived already. He had 
 offered himself to her with no fervid passion— with no assured 
 belief in her power to make liim happy. Nay, he had rather 
 forced from her the confession of her love by his piteous repre- 
 sentation of himself as a man doomed to early death. He had 
 wrung from her the offer of a life's devotion. She had given 
 herself to him almost unwooed. Never before had her 
 betrothal appeared to her in this humiliating aspect ; but now, 
 enlightened by the knowledge of that former love, a love 
 so reckless and self-sacrificing, it seemed to her that the homage 
 offered her had been of the coldest — that her affection had been 
 placidly accepted, rather than passionately demanded of her. 
 
 ' Fool, fool, fool,' she said within herself, bowed to the dust 
 by this deep humiliation. 
 
 ' My darling, why don't you speak tome?' said Mrs. Tregonell,
 
 Le Secret de Polichinelle. 107 
 
 tenderly, with her arm round the girl's neck, her face leaning 
 down to touch *hat drooping head. 
 
 ' What can L say ? I feel as if my life had suddenly come to 
 an end, and there were nothing left for me to do, except just to sit 
 still and remember what has been.' 
 
 ' You mean to break with him ? ' 
 
 'Break with him ! Why he has never been mine. There is 
 nothing to be broken. It was all a delusion and a dream. I 
 thought he loved me — loved me exactly as I loved him — with 
 the one great and perfect love of a lifetime — and now I know 
 that he never loved me — how coidd he after having only just 
 left off loving this other woman 1 — if he had left off loving 
 her. And how could he when she is so perfectly lovely I Why 
 should he have ever ceased to care for her 1 She had been like 
 his wife, you say — his wife in all but the name — and all the world 
 knew it. What must people have thought of me for stealing 
 away another woman's husband ? ' 
 
 ' My dear, the world does not see it in that light. She never 
 was really his wife.' 
 
 ' She ought to have been,' answered Christabel, resolutely, 
 yet with quivering lips. ' If he cared for her so much as to 
 make himself the world's wonder for her sake he should have 
 married her : a man should not play fast and loose with love.' 
 
 ' It is difficult for us to judge,' said Mrs. Tregonell, believing 
 herself moved by the very spirit of justice, 'we are not women 
 of the world — we cannot see this matter as the world sees it.' 
 
 ' God forbid that I should judge as the world judges ! ' 
 exclaimed Christabel, lifting her head for the first time since 
 that story had been told her. ' That would be a sorry end of your 
 teaching. What ought I to do 1 ' 
 
 ' Your own heart must be the arbiter, Christabel. I made 
 up my mind this afternoon that I would not seek to influence you 
 one way or the other. Your own heart must decide.' 
 
 ' My own heart ? No ; my heart is too entirely his — too 
 weakly, fondly, foolishly, devoted to him. No, I must think oi 
 something beyond my foolish love for him. His honour and 
 mine are at stake. We must be true to ourselves, he and I. But 
 I want to know what you think, Auntie. I want to know what 
 you would have done in such a case. If, when you were engaged 
 to his father, you had discovered that he had been within only a 
 little while ' — these last words were spoken with inexpressible 
 pathos, as if here the heart-wound were deepest — ' the lover of 
 another woman — bound to her by ties which a man of honour 
 should hold sacred — what would you have done I Would you 
 have shut your eyes resolutely upon that past history ? Would 
 you have made up your mind to forget everything, and to try to 
 be happy with him 1 '
 
 108 Mount Boyal. 
 
 i I don't know, Belle,' Mrs. Tregonell answered, helplessly,' 
 very anxious to be true and conscientious, and if she must needs 
 be guide, to guide the girl aright through this perilous passage 
 in Tier life. 'It is so difficult at my age to know what one 
 would have done in one's girlhood. The flres are all burnt out ; 
 the springs that moved one then are all broken. Judging now, 
 with the dull deliberation of middle age, I should say it would 
 be a dangerous thing for any girl to marry a man who had beeb 
 notoriously devoted to another woman — that woman still living, 
 still having power to charm him. How can you ever be secure 
 of his love 1 how be sure that he would not be lured back to the 
 old madness 1 These women are so full of craft — it is theii 
 profession to tempt men to destruction. You remember what 
 the Bible saysjof such 1 " They are more bitter than death : their 
 feet go down to death : their steps take hold on hell." ' 
 
 ' Don't, Auntie,' faltered Christabel. ' Yes, I understand. 
 Yes, he would tire of me, and go back to her very likely. I am 
 not half so lovely, nor half so fascinating. Or, if he were true 
 to honour and duty, he would regret her all his life. He 
 would be always repenting that he had not broken down all 
 barriers and married her. He would see her sometimes on the 
 stage, or in the Park, and just the sight of her face flashing past 
 him would spoil his happiness. Happiness,' she repeated, 
 bitterly, ' what happiness 1 what peace could there be for either 
 of us, knowing of that fatal love. I have decided, Auntie, I shall 
 love Angus all the days of my life, but I will never marry him.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell clasped the girl in her arms, and they wept 
 together, one with the slow silent tears of life that was well- 
 nigh worn out, the other with youth's passionate sobs — sobs that 
 shook the slender frame. 
 
 ' My beloved, you have chosen wisely, and well,' said the 
 widow, her heart throbbing with new hopes — it was not of 
 Angus Hamleigh's certain loss she thought, but of her son 
 Leonard's probable gain — 'you have chosen wisely. I do not 
 believe that you could ever have been really happy with him. 
 Your heart woiud have been consumed with jealous fears — > 
 suspicion would have haunted your life — that evil woman't 
 influence would have darkened all your days.' 
 
 ' Don't say another word,' pleaded Christabel, in low hoarse 
 tones ; ' I have quite made up my mind. Nothing can change it. 
 
 She did not want to be encouraged or praised ; she did 
 not want comfort or consolation. Even her aunt's sympathy 
 jarred upon her fretted nerves. She felt that she must stand 
 alone in her misery, aloof from all human succour. 
 
 'Good-night,' she said, bending down to touch her aunt'a 
 forehead, with tremulous lips. 
 
 Won't you stay, dear ? Sleep with me to-night' 
 
 i
 
 Le Secret de Polichinelle. 10fl 
 
 ' Sleep V eclioed the girL ' No, Auntie dear ; I would rathei 
 le in my own room !' 
 
 She went away without another word, and went slowly back 
 to her own room, the pretty little London bedchamber, bright 
 with new satin-wood furniture and pale blue cretonne hangings, 
 tlouded with creamy Indian muslin, a bower-like room, with 
 flowers and books, and a miniature piano in a convenient 
 recess by the fire-place. Here she sat gravely down before 
 her davenport and unlocked one particular drawer, a so-called 
 secret drawer, but as obvious as a secret panel in a melodrama — 
 and took out Angus Hamleigh's letters. The long animated 
 letters written on thin paper, letters which were a journal of 
 his thoughts and feelings, almost as fully recorded as in those 
 •.-ulunmious epistles which Werther despatched to his friend — 
 letters which had bridged over the distance between Cornwall and 
 Southern France, and had been the chief delight of Christabel's 
 life through the long slow winter, making her lover her daily 
 companion. 
 
 Slowly, slowly, with tears dropping unnoticed every now and 
 then, she turned over the letters, one by one — now pausing to 
 read a few lines — now a whole letter. There is no loving folly of 
 which she had not been guilty with regard to these cherished 
 letters : she had slept with them under her pillow, she had read 
 them over and over again, had garnered them in a perfumed 
 desk, and gone back to them after the lapse of time, had com- 
 pared them in her own mind with all the cleverest letters 
 that ever were given to the world — with Walpole, with Beckford, 
 with Byron, with Deffand, and Espinasse, Sevigne, Carter — 
 and found in them a grace and a charm that surpassed all these. 
 She had read elegant extracts to her aunt, who confessed 
 that Mr. Hamleigh wrote cleverly, wittily, picturesquely, 
 poetically, but did not perceive that immeasurable superiority to 
 all previous letter-writers. Then came briefer letters, dated from 
 the Albany — notes dashed off hastily in those happy days when 
 ^.heir lives were spent for the most part together. Notes con- 
 taining suggestions for some new 7 pleasure— appointments- sweet 
 nothings, hardly worth setting down except as an excuse 
 for writing — with here and there a longer letter, written after 
 midnight ; a letter in which the writer poured out his soul to his 
 beloved, enlarging on their conversation of the day — that happy 
 tall: about themselves and love. 
 
 ' Who would think, reading these, that he never really cared 
 for me, that I was only an after-thought in his life,' she said 
 to herself, bitterly. 
 
 ' Did he write just such letters to Stella Mayne, I wonder ? 
 No ; there was no need for writing — they were always together.' 
 
 The candles on her desk had burnt low by the time her tasJs
 
 110 Mourn lioyal. 
 
 was done. Faint gleams of morning stole through the striped 
 blinds, as she sealed the packet in which she had folded thai 
 lengthy history of Angus Hamleigh's courtship— a large squarfl 
 packet, tied with stout red tape, and sealed in several places 
 Her hand hardly faltered as she set her seal upon the wax ; her 
 purpose was so strong. 
 
 ' Yes,' she said to herself, ' I will do what is best and safest 
 for his honour and for mine.' And then she knelt by her bed 
 and prayed long and fervently ; and remained upon her knees 
 reading* the Gospel as the night melted away and the morning 
 sun Hooded her room with light. 
 
 She did not even attempt to sleep, trusting to her cold bath 
 for strength against the day's ordeal. She thought all the time 
 she was dressing of the task that lay before her — the calm 
 deliberate cancehnent of her engagement, with the least possible 
 pain for the man she l®ved, and for his ultimate gain in this 
 world and the next. Was it not for the welfare of a man's soul 
 that he should do his duty and repair the wrong that he had 
 done ; rather than that he should conform to the world's idea of 
 the fitness of things and make an eminently respectable 
 marriage ? 
 
 Christabel contemplated herself critically in the glass as she 
 brushed her hair. Her eyelids were swollen with weeping— her 
 cheeks pallid, her eyes lustreless, and at this disadvantage she 
 compared herself with that vivid and sylph-like beauty she had 
 seen at the Kaleidoscope. 
 
 ' How could he ever forget her for my sake 1 ' she thought, 
 looking at that sad colourless face, and falling into the common 
 error that only the most beautiful women are loved with perfect 
 love, that perfection of feeling answers to perfection of form- 
 forgetting how the history of life shows that upon the unlovely 
 also there have been poured treasures of deepest, purest love- 
 that, while beauty charms and wins all, there is often one, best 
 worth the winning, who is to be vanquished by some subtler 
 charm, held by some less obvious chai-n than Aphrodite's rosy 
 garlands. Perhaps, if Miss Courtenay nad been a plain woman, 
 skilled in the art of making the most of small advantages, she 
 would have had more faith in her own power ; but being a 
 lovely woman who had been so trained and taught as to think 
 very little of her own beauty, she was all the more ready ta 
 i knowledge the superior loveliness of a rival. 
 
 ' Having worshipped that other fairer face, how could he 
 care for me ? ' she asked herself ; and then, brooding upon every 
 detail of their betrothal, she came to the bitter conclusion that 
 Angus had offered himself to her out of pity— touched by her 
 too Obvious affection for him— love which she ha I hardly tried 
 to hide from him, when once he had told her of his early doom.
 
 Le Secret de Polichinelle. Ill 
 
 That storm of pity and regret which had swept over her heart 
 had annihilated her womanly pride : she forgot all that was due 
 to her own dignity, and was only too eager to offer herself as the 
 companion and consoler of his brief days. She looked back and 
 remembered her folly — thinking of herself as a creature caught 
 in a trap. 
 
 No, assuredly, there was but one remedy. 
 
 One doubt — one frail straw of hope to which she might cling 
 — yet remained. That tried, all was decided. Was this story 
 true— completely and positively a fact ? She had heard so much 
 in society about baseless scandals— she had been told so many 
 versions of the same story — as unlike as black to white or false 
 to true— and she was not going to take this one bitter fact for 
 granted upon the strength of any fashionable Medusa who might 
 try to turn her warm beating heart to stone. Before she accepted 
 Medusa's sentence she would discover for herself how far this 
 etory was true. 
 
 ' I will give no one any trouble,' she thought : ' I will act for 
 myself, and judge for myself. It will be the making or marring 
 of three lives.' 
 
 In her wide charity, in that power to think and feel for 
 others, which was the highest gift of her rich sweet soul, Stella 
 Mayne seemed to Christabel as important a factor in this life- 
 problem as herself or Angus. She thought of her tenderly, 
 picturing her as a modern Gretchen, tempted by an early and 
 intense love, much more than by the devil's lure of splendour 
 and jewels — a poor little Gretchen at seventeen and sixpence a 
 week, living in a London garret, with no mother to watch and 
 warn, and with wicked old Marthas in plenty to whisper bad advice. 
 
 Clnistabel went down to breakfast as usual. Her quiet face 
 and manner astonished Mrs. Tregonell, who had slept very little 
 better than her niece ; but when the servant came in to ask if 
 she would ride she refused. 
 
 ' Do, dear,' pleaded her aunt ; ' a nice long country ride by 
 Finchley and Hendon would do you good.' 
 
 ' No, Aunt Di — I would rather be at home this morning,' 
 answered Christabel ; so the man departed, with an order for 
 the carriage at the usual hour in the afternoon. 
 
 There was a letter from Angus — Christabel only glanced at 
 the opening lines, which told her that he was to stay at Hillside 
 a few days longer, and then put the letter in her pocket. Jessie 
 Bridgeman looked at her curiously — knowing very well tha* 
 there was something sorely amiss — but waiting to be told what 
 sudden cloud of sorr-ow meant. » 
 
 CI I went back to her own room directly after break- 
 
 t B - mat fi reb< re any attempt at consolation, knowing it 
 
 wnd beat to let tLe girl bi ar her grief in her own wav
 
 112 Mount Royal. 
 
 1 You will go with me for a drive after luncheon, dear 1 ' she 
 asked. 
 
 ' Yes, Auntie — but I would rather we went a little way in 
 the co«ntry, if you don't mind, instead of to the Park ? ' 
 
 ' With all my heart : I have had quite enough of the Park.' 
 
 ' The " booing, and booing, and booing," ' said Jessie, ' and the 
 Btiaining one's every nerve to see the Princess drive by — only to 
 discover the humiliating fact that she is one of the very few 
 re?pectable-looking women in the Park — perhaps the only one 
 who can look absolutely respectable without being a dowdy.' 
 
 ' Shall I go to her room and try if I can be of any comfort 
 to her 1 ' mused Jessie, as she went up to her own snug little den 
 on the third floor. ' Better not, perhaps. I like to hug my sor- 
 rows. I should hate any one who thought their prattle could 
 lessen my pain. She will bear hers best alone, I dare say. But 
 what can it be? Not any quarrel with him. They could 
 hardly quarrel by telegraph or post— they who are all honey 
 when they are together. It is some scandal — something that 
 old demon with the eyebrows said yesterday. I am sure of it 
 — a talk between two elderly women with closed doors always 
 means Satan's own mischief.' 
 
 All three ladies went out in the carriage after luncheon — a 
 dreary, dusty drive, towards Edgware — past everlasting bricks 
 and mortar, as it seemed to Christabel's tired eyes, which gazed 
 at the houses as if they had been phantoms, so little human 
 meaning had they for her — so little did she realize that in each 
 of those brick and plaster packing-cases human beings lived, and. 
 in their turn, suffered some such heart-agony as this which she 
 was enduring to-day. 
 
 ' That is St. John's Wood up yonder, isn't it 1 ' she asked, 
 as they passed Carlton Hill, speaking for almost the first time 
 since they left Mayfair. 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 ' Isn't it somewhere about there Miss Stella Mayne lives, the 
 actress we saw the other night 1 ' asked Christabel, carelessly. 
 
 iler aunt looked at her with intense surprise, — how could 
 6he pronounce that name, and to ask a frivolous question 1 
 
 ' Yes ; she has a lovely house called the Bosary. Mr. Fitz- 
 Pelham told me about it,' answered Jessie. 
 
 Christabel said never a word more as the carriage rolled on 
 by Cricklewood and the two Welsh Harps, and turned into the 
 quiet lanes about Hendon, and so home by the Finchley Boad. 
 She had found out what she wanted to know. 
 
 When afternoon tea was served in the little third drawing- 
 room, where Mrs. Tregonell sat resting herself after the dust 
 and weariness of the drive, Christabel was missing. Dormei 
 brought a little note for her mistress.
 
 'Love is Love for Evermore.> 113 
 
 ' Miss Courtenay gave me this just before she went out, 
 ma'am.' 
 
 ' Out ! ITas Miss Courtenay gone out ? ' 
 ' Yes, ma'am ; Daniel got her a cab five minutes ago.' 
 1 To her dressmaker, I suppose,' said Mrs. Tregonell, trying to 
 look indifferent. 
 
 ' Don't be uneasy about me, Auntie,' wrote Christabel : ' I 
 am going on an errand about winch I made up my mind last 
 night. I may be a little late for dinner, but as I shall go and 
 return in the same cab, you may feel sure that I shall be quite 
 safe. Don't wait dinner for me.' 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 'love is love for evermore.' 
 
 The Rosary, St. John's Wood : that was the address which 
 Christabel had given the cabman. Had any less distinguished 
 person than Stella Mayne lived at the Rosary it might have 
 taken the cabman all the evening to find that particular house, 
 with no more detailed address as to road and number. But a 
 brother whip on a rank near Hamilton Terrace was able to tell 
 Christabel's cabman the way to the Rosary. It was a house at 
 which hansoms were often wanted at unholy hours between mid- 
 night and sunrise — a house whose chief hospitality took the form 
 of chablis and oysters after the play — a house which seldom 
 questioned poor cabby's claim or went closely into mileage — a 
 house which deserved and commanded respectful mention on 
 the rank. 
 
 1 The Rosary — yes, that's where Miss Mayne lives. Beech 
 Tree Road— a low 'ouse with veranders all round — yer can't 
 miss it.' 
 
 The cabman rattled away to Grove End Road, and thence to 
 the superior quietude and seclusion of Beech Tree Road, where 
 he drew up at a house with a glazed entrance. He rang the bell, 
 and Christabel alighted before the summons was answered. 
 
 ' Is Miss Mayne at home 1 ' she asked a servant in plain 
 olothcs — a servant of unquestionable respectability. 
 
 ' Yes, ma'am,' he replied, and preceded her along a corridor 
 glass-roofed, richly carpeted, and with a bank of hothouse flowers 
 on either side. 
 
 Only at this ultimate moment did Christabel's courage begir. 
 to falter. She felt as if she were perhaps entering a den of vice. 
 Innocent, guileless as she was, she had her own vague ideas about 
 vice — exaggerated as all ignorant ideas are apt to be. She began 
 
 I
 
 Hi Mount Bcyal. 
 
 to shiver as she walked over the dark subdued velvet pile of that 
 shadowy corridor. If she had found Miss Mayne engaged in 
 giving a masked ball — or last night's sapper party only just 
 finishing — or a party of young men playing blind hookey, she 
 would hardly have been surprised — not that she knew anything 
 about masked balls — or late suppers — or gambling — but that all 
 these would have come within her vague notions of an evil life. 
 
 ' He loved her,' she said to herself, arguing against this new 
 terror, ' and he could not love a thoroughly wicked woman.' 
 
 No, the Gretchen idea — purity fallen, simplicity led asti'ay — 
 was more natural — but one could hardly imagine Gretchen in a 
 house of this kind — this subdued splendour — this all-pervading 
 air of wealth and luxury. 
 
 Miss Courtenay was shown into a small morning-room — a 
 room which on one side was all window — opening on to a garden, 
 where some fine old trees gave an idea of space — and where the 
 foreground showed a mass of flowers — roses — roses — roses every- 
 where — trailing over arches — clustering round tall iron rods — 
 bush roses — standard roses — dwarf roses — all shining in the 
 golden light of a westering sun. 
 
 The room was elegantly simple — an escritoire in the Sherraton 
 style — two or three book-tables crowded with small volumes in 
 exquisite binding, vellum, creamy calf, brown Russia, red edges, 
 gold edges, painted edges, all the prettinesses of bookbinding — 
 half a dozen low chairs — downy nests covered with soft tawny 
 Indian silk, with here and there a brighter patch of colour in the 
 shape of a plush pillow or an old brocade antimacassar — 
 voluminous curtains of the same soft tawny silk, embroidered 
 with poppies and cornflowers — a few choice flowers in old 
 Venetian vases — a large peacock-foather fan thrown beside an 
 open book, upon a low pillow-shaped ottoman. 
 
 Christabel gazed round the room in blank surprise — nothing 
 gaudy — nothing vulgar — nothing that indicated sudden promo- 
 tion from the garret to the drawing-room — an air of elegant 
 luxury, of supreme fashion in all things — but no glare of gilding, 
 no discords in form or colour. 
 
 ' Your name, if you please, madam 1 ' said the servant, a 
 model of decorum in well-brushed black. 
 
 ' Perhaps you had better take my card. I am not personally 
 known to Miss Mayne,' answered Christabel, opening her card- 
 case. ' Oh ! ' she exclaimed suddenly, as with a cry of pain. 
 
 ' I beg your pardon,' said the servant, alarmed. 
 
 'It's nothing. A picture startled me — that was all. Be 
 good enough to tell Miss Mayne that I shall be very much 
 obliged to her if she will see me.' 
 
 ' Certainly, madam ! said the man, as he retired with the 
 card, wondering how a young lady of such distinguished appear.
 
 'Love is Love for Evermore.' 115 
 
 ftnee happened to call upon his mistress, whose feminine visitors 
 were usually of a more marked type. 
 
 'I dare say she's collectin' funds for one of their evcrlastin' 
 churches,' thought the butler, "igh, low, or Jack, as I call 
 Vm — 'igh church, low church, or John Wesley — ever so many 
 predominations, and all of 'em equally keen after money, But 
 why did she almost s'riek when she clapt her eyes on Mr. 
 'Amleigh's portrait, 1 wonder, just as if she had seen a scorpiont.' 
 
 Christabel stood motionless where the man left her, looking 
 at a photograph on a brass easel upon an old ebony table in the 
 middle of the room. A cluster of stephanotis in a low Venetian 
 vase stood in front of that portrait, like flowers before a shrine. 
 It was an exquisitely painted photograph of Ansjus Hamleigh — ■ 
 Angus at his best and brightest, before the flush and glory of 
 youth had faded from eyes and brow- — Angus with a vivacity 
 of expression which she had never seen in his face — she who had 
 known him only since the fatal hereditary disease had set its 
 mark upon him. 
 
 1 Ah ! ' she sighed, ' he was happier when he loved her than 
 he ever was with me.' 
 
 She stood gazing at that pictured face, her hands clasped, her 
 heart beating heavily. Everything confirmed her inher despair — 
 in her iron resolve. At last with a long-drawn sigh, she with- 
 drew her eyes from the picture, and began to explore the room. 
 No, there was no trace of vulgarity — no ugly indication of 
 a vicious mind. Christabel glanced at the open book on 
 the ottoman, half expecting to find the trail of the serpent 
 there — in some shameful French novel, the very name of which 
 she had not been allowed to hear. But the book was only the 
 last Contemporary Review, open at an article of Gladstone's. 
 Then, with faintly tremulous hand, she took one of the vellum- 
 bound duodecimos from a shelf of the revolving book-tabh — ■ 
 'Selections from Shelley' — and on the title-page, 'Angus to 
 Stella, Rome,' and the date, just three years old, in the hand she 
 knew so well. She looked in other books — all choicest flowers 
 of literature — and in each there was the same familiar penman- 
 ship, sometimes with a brief sentence that made the book a 
 souvenir — sometimes with a passionate line from Shakespeare or 
 Dante, Heine or De Musset. Christabel remembered, with a 
 (sharp pang cf jealousy, that her lover had never so written in 
 any book he had given her. She ignored the change which a 
 year or two may make in a man's character, when he has reached 
 one of the turning points of life ; and how a graver deeper 
 phase of feeling, less eager to express itself in other people's 
 Bowery language, succeeds youth's fervid sentiment. Had 
 Werther lived and loved a second Charlotte, assuredly lie wi i [-.] 
 have loved her after a wiser and graver fashion. But Christabel
 
 110 Mount Royav. 
 
 had believed herself her lover's first and only love, and finding 
 that she was but the second volume in his life, abandoned 
 herself at once to despair. 
 
 She sank into one of the low luxurious chairs, just as the 
 door opened, and Miss Mayne came into the room. 
 
 If she had looked lovely as Psyche, in her classic drapery, 
 with the emerald butterfly on her shoulder, she looked no less 
 beautiful in the costly-simplicity of her home toilet. She wore 
 a sacque-shaped tea-gown of soft French-grey silk, lined with 
 palest pink satin, over a petticoat that seemed a mass of cream- 
 coloured lace. Her only ornaments were three half-hoop rings- 
 rubies, diamonds, and sapphires — too large for the slender third 
 finger of her left hand, and half concealing a thin wedding-ring — 
 and a star-shaped broach — one large cat's-eye with diamond 
 rays, which fastened the lace handkerchief at her throat. 
 
 Christabol, quick to observe the woman whose existence had 
 ruined her life, noted everything, from the small perfectly-shaped 
 head — shaped for beauty rather than mental power — to the 
 little arched foot in its pearl-coloured .silk stocking, and grey 
 satin slipper. For the fust time in her life she beheld a woman 
 whose chief business in this world was to look her loveliest, at 
 all times and seasons, for friend or foe — for whom the perfection 
 of costume was the study and delight of life — who lived and 
 reigned by the divine right of beauty. 
 
 ' Pray sit down !' said Miss Mayne, with a careless wave of 
 her hand — so small — so delicate and fragile-looking under the 
 lace ruffle ; ' I am quite at a loss to guess to what I am indebted 
 for the honour of this visit.' 
 
 She looked at her visitor scrutinizingly with those dark, too 
 lustrous eyes. Alicct^ flush burned in her hollow cheeks. She 
 had heard a good deal about this Miss Courtenay, of Mount 
 Poyal and Mayfair, and she came prepared to do battle. 
 
 For some moments Christabel was dumb. It was one thing 
 to have come into this young lioness's den, and another thing to 
 know what to say to the lioness. But the stiaightness and 
 purity of the girl's puipose upheld her — and her courage hardly 
 faltered. 
 
 ' I have come to yon. Miss Mayne, because I will not consent 
 to be governed by common report. I want to know the truth — 
 the whole truth — however bitter it may be forme — in order that 
 X may know how to act.' 
 
 Miss Mayne had expected a much sharper mode of attack. 
 She had been prepared to hear herself called scorpion — or viper 
 — the pest of society — a form of address to which she would 
 have been able to reply with a startling sharpness. But to be 
 spoken to thus — gravely, gently, pleadingly, and with that sweet 
 girlish face looking at her in unspeakable sorrow^ — was something 
 for which she had uoi prepared herself.
 
 1 Love is Love for Evermore: 117 
 
 'You speak to me like a lady — like a good woman,' she said, 
 falteringly. ' What is it you want to know 1 ' 
 
 ' I have been told that Mr. Hamleigh — Angus Hamleigh — 
 was once your lover. Is that true 1 ' 
 
 'True as the stars in heaven — the stars by which we swore 
 to love each other to the end of our lives — looking up at them, 
 with our hands clasped, as we stood on the deck of the steamer 
 between Dover and Calais. That was our marriage. I used to 
 think that God saw it, and accepted it — just as if we had been 
 in church : only it did not hold water, you see,' she added, with 
 a cynical laugh, which ended in a hard little cough. 
 
 ; lie loved you dearly. I can see that by the lines that he 
 wrote in your books. I ventured to look at them while I waited 
 fi »r you. "Why did he not marry you ? ' 
 
 Stella Mayne shrugged her shoulders, and played with thg 
 soft lace of her fi 
 
 ' It is not the fashion to marry a girl who dances in short 
 petticoat?, and lives in an attic," she answered. 'Perhaps such 
 a girl might make a good wife, if a man had the courage to try 
 the experiment. Such things have been done, I believe; but 
 men prefer the safer course. If I had been clever, I dare- 
 say Mr. Hamleigh would have married me ; but I was an 
 ignorant little fool — and when lie came across my path he 
 seemed like an angel of light. I simply worshipped him. 
 You've no idea how innocent I was in those days. Not a care- 
 fully educated, lady-like innocence, like yours, don't you know, 
 but absolute ignorance. I didn't know any wrong ; but then 1 
 didn't know any right. You see I am quite candid with you.' 
 
 ' I thank you with all my heart for your truthfulness. Every- 
 thing — for you, for me, for Angus — depends upon our perfect 
 truthfulness. I want to do what is best — what is wisest — what 
 is right — not for myself only, but for Angus, for you.' 
 
 Tho^e love'y liquid eyes looked at her incredulously. 
 
 ' What,' cried Stella Mayne, with her mocking little laugh 
 — a musical little laugh trained for comedy, and unconsciously 
 artificial — 'do you mean to tell me that you care a straw what 
 becomes of me — that it matters to you whether I die in the 
 gutter wdiere I was born, or pitch myself imo the Regent's 
 Canal some night wdien I have a fit of the blue devils 1 ' 
 
 ' I care very much what becomes of you. I should not be 
 here if I did not wisn io do what is best for you.' 
 
 ' Then you come as my friend, and not as my enemy ? ' said 
 Stella. 
 
 'Yes, I am here as your friend,' answered Christabel, with 
 an effort. 
 
 The actress — a creature all impulse and emotion — fell on hor 
 knees at Miss Courtenay'a feet, and pressed her lips upon the 
 lady's gloved hand.
 
 118 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' How good you are,' she exclaimed — ' bow good — how gooa 
 I have read of such women — they swarm in the novels I gei 
 from Mudie— they and fiends. There's no middle distance. 
 But I never believed in them. "When the man brought me your 
 card I thought you had come to blackguard me.' 
 
 Christabel shuddered at the coarse word, so out of harmon. 
 <*dth that vellum-bound Shelley, and all the graciousness Ox 
 Miss Mayne's surroundings. 
 
 ' Forgive me,' said Stella, seeing her disgust. ' I am horribly 
 vulgar. I never was like that while— while Angus cared for 
 me.' 
 
 ' Why did he leave off caring for you 1 ?' asked Christabel, 
 looking gravely down at the lovely upturned face, so exquisite 
 in its fragile sensitive beauty. 
 
 Now Stella Mayne was one of those complex creatures, quite 
 out of the range of a truthful woman's understanding — a crea- 
 ture who could be candour itself— could gush and prattle with 
 the innocent expansiveness of a child, so long as there was 
 nothing she particularly desired to conceal — yet who could lie 
 with the same sweet air of child-like simplicity when it served 
 her purpose —lie with the calm stolidity, the invincible assurance, 
 of an untruthful child. She did not answer Christabel's question 
 immediately, but looked at her thoughfully for a few seconds, 
 wondering how much of her history this young lady knew, and 
 to what extent lying might serve. She had slipped from her 
 knees to a sitting position on the Persian hearthrug, her thin, 
 semi-transparent hands clasped upon her knee, the triple circlet 
 of gems flashing in the low sunlight. 
 
 ' Why did we part ? ' she asked, shrugging her shoulders. 
 'I hardly know. Temper, I suppose. He has not too good a 
 temper, and I— well, I am a demon when I am ill— and I am 
 often ill.' 
 
 ' You keep his portrait on your table,' said Christabel. 
 
 ' K>ep it ? Yes — and round my neck,' answered Stella, 
 jerking a gold locket out of her loose gown, and opening it to 
 show the miniature inside. ' I have worn his picture against 
 my heart ever since he gave it me — during our first Italian tour. 
 I shall wear it so when I am dead. Yes— when he is married, 
 and happy with you, and I am lying in my grave in Hendon 
 Churchyard. Do you know I have bought and paid for my 
 grave V 
 
 ' Why did you do that 1 ' 
 
 1 Because I wanted to make sure of not being buried in a 
 cemetery — a city of the dead — streets and squares and alleys of 
 gravestones. I have chosen a spot under a great spreading 
 cedar, in a churchyard that might be a hundred miles from 
 London —and yet it is quite near here, and handy for those who
 
 * Love in Love for Evermore' HE 
 
 will have to take rue. I shall not give any one too much trouble. 
 Perhaps, if you will let him, Angus may come to my funeral, 
 and drop a bunch of violets on my coffin.' 
 
 ' Why do you talk like that 1 ' 
 
 1 Because the end cannot be very far off. Do you think I 
 look as if I should live to be a grandmother ! ' 
 
 The hectic bloom, the unnatural light in those lovely eyes, 
 the transparent bauds, and purple-tinted nails, did not, indeed, 
 point to such a conclusion. 
 
 'If you are really ill why do you go on acting?' asked 
 Christabel, gently. ' Surely the fatigue and excitement must be 
 very bad for you.' 
 
 ' I hardly know. The fatigue may be killing me, but the 
 excitement is the only thing that keeps me alive. Besides, I 
 must live — thirty pounds a week is a consideration.' 
 
 ' But — you are not in want of money 1 ' exclaimed Christabel. 
 ' Mr. Hamleigh would never ' 
 
 ' Leave me to starve,' interrupted Stella, hurriedly ; ' no I 
 have plenty of money. While — while we were happy — Mr. 
 Hamleigh lavished his money upon me — he was always absurdly 
 generous — and if I wanted money now I should have but to 
 hold out my hand. I have never known the want of money 
 since I left my attic — four and sixpence a week, with the use of 
 the kitchen fire, to boil a kettle, or cook a chop — when my 
 resources rose to a chop — it was oftener a bloater. Do you 
 kuow, the other day, when I was dreadfully ill and they had 
 been worrying me with invalid turtle, jellies, oysters, caviare, 
 all kinds of loathsome daintinesses — and the doctor said I should 
 die if I didn't eat — I thought perhaps I might get back the old 
 appetite for bloater and bread and butter— I used to enjoy a 
 bloater tea so in those old days — but it was no use— the very 
 smell of the thing almost killed me— the whole house wae 
 poisoned with it.' 
 
 She prattled on, looking up at Christabel with a confiding 
 srrrile. The visit had taken quite a pleasant turn. She had no 
 idea that anything serious was to come of it. Her quondam 
 lover's affianced wife had taken it into her head to come and see 
 what kind of stuff Mr. Hamleigh's former idol was made of — 
 that was all — and the lady's amiability was making the interview 
 altogether agreeable. 
 
 Yet, in another moment, the pain and sorrow in Christabel's 
 face showed her that there was something stronger than frivolous 
 curiosity in the lady's mind. 
 
 ' Pray be serious with me,' said Christabel. ' Remember that 
 the welfare of three people depends upon my resolution in this 
 matter. It would be easy for me to say — I will shut my eyes to 
 the past : he has told me that he loves roe — and I will believe
 
 120 Mount Royal. 
 
 him. Bat I will not do that. I will not live a life of suspicion 
 ami unrest, just for the sweet privilege of bearing him company, 
 and being called by his name — dear as that thought is to me. 
 No, it shall be all or nothing. If I cannot have his whole heart 
 I will have none of it. You confess that you wear his picture 
 next your heart. Do you still love him V 
 
 'Yes — always — always — always,' answered the actress, fer- 
 vently. This at least was no bold-faced lie — there was truth's 
 divine accent here. 'There is no man like him on this earth. 
 And then in low impassioned tones she quoted those passionate 
 lines of Mrs. Browning's : — 
 
 ' There is no one beside theo, and no one above thee ; 
 Tbou standest alone as tbe nightingale sings ; 
 And my words, tbat would praise thee, are impotent things.' 
 
 ' And do you believe that he has quite left off loving you ] ' 
 
 ' No,' answered the actress, looking up at her with flashing 
 eyes. ' I don't believe it. I don't believe he could after all we 
 have been to each other. It isn't in human nature Lo forget such 
 love as ours.' 
 
 'And you believe — if he were free — if he had not engaged 
 himself to me — perhaps hardly intending it — he would come 
 back to you V 
 
 'Yes, if he knew how ill I am — if he knew what the doctor 
 says about me — I believe he would come back.' 
 
 ' And marry you ] ' asked Christabel, deadly pale. 
 
 ' That's as may be,' retorted the other, with her Parisian shrug. 
 
 Christabel stood up, and laid her clenched hand on the low 
 draperied mantelpiece, almost as if she were laying it on an altar 
 to give emphasis to an oath. ' Then he shall come back — then he 
 shall marry you,' she said in a grave, earnest voice. ' I will rob 
 no woman of her husband. I will doom no fellow- creature to 
 life-long shame !' 
 
 'What,' cried Stella Mayne, with almost a shriek, 'you will 
 give him up — for me !' 
 
 ' Yes. He has never belonged to me as he has belonged to 
 you — it is no shame for me to renounce him — grief and pain 
 — yes, grief and pain unspeakable — but no disgrace. He has 
 sinned, and he must atone for his sin. I will not be the impedi- 
 ment to your marriage.' 
 
 ' But if you were to give him up he might not marry me : 
 men are so difficult to manage,' faltered the actress, aghast at 
 Hie idea of such a sacrifice, seeing the whole business in the 
 light of circumstances unknown to Miss Courtenay. 
 
 ' Not men with conscience and honour,' answered Christabel, 
 with unshaken firmness. ' I feel very sure that if Mr. Hamleigh 
 were free he would do what is right. It is only his engagement
 
 juove is Love for Evermore.' 121 
 
 to me tha«i hinders his making atonement to you lie has lived 
 among worldly people who have never reminded him of his duty 
 —who have blunted his finer feelings with their hideous word- 
 linens- oh, I know how worldly women talk — as if there were 
 neither hell nor heaven, only Belgravia and Mayfair — and no 
 doubt worldly men sre still worse. But he — he whom I have so 
 loved and honoured — cannot be without honour and cg <. science 
 He shall do what is just and right.' 
 
 She looked almost inspired as she stood there with pale 
 cheeks and kindling eyes, thinking far more of that broad prin- 
 ciple of justice than of the fragile emotional creature tremblmg 
 before her. This comes of feeding a girl's mind with Shake- 
 speare and Bacon, CVtrlyle and Plato, to say nothing of that 
 still broader and safer guide, the Gospel. 
 
 Just then there was the sound of footsteps approaching the 
 door — a measured masculine footfall. The emotional creature 
 fiew to the door, opened it, murmured a few words to some 
 person without, and closed it, but not before a whiff" of Latakia 
 had been wafted into the flower-scented room. The footsteps 
 moved away in another direction, and Christabel was much too 
 absorbed to notice that faint breath of tobacco. 
 
 'There's not the least use in your giving him up,' said Stella, 
 resolutely : 'he would never many me. You don't know him aa 
 well as 1 do.' 
 
 ' Do I not ? I have lived only to study his character for the 
 best part of a year. I know he will do what is just.' 
 
 Stella Mayne suddenly clasped her hands before her face and 
 sobbed aloud. 
 
 ' Oh, if I were only good and innocent like you ! ' she cried, 
 
 Eiteously ; ' how I detest myself as I stand here before you ! — 
 ow loathsome — how hateful I am !' 
 
 ' No, no,' murmured Christabel, soothingly, ' you are not 
 hateful : it is oidy impenitent sin that is hateful. You were led 
 into wrong-doing because you were ignorant of right — there was 
 no one to teach you — no one to uphold you. And he who 
 tempted you is in duty bound to make amends. Trust me — 
 trust me — it is better for my peace as well as for yours that he 
 should do his duty. And now good-bye — I have stayed too long 
 already.' 
 
 Again Stella Mayne fell on her knees and clasped this divine 
 visitant's hand. It seemed to this weak yet fervid soul almost 
 as if some angel guest had crossed her threshold. Christabel 
 stooped and would have kissed the actress's forehead. 
 
 ' No,' slie cried, historically, 'don't kiss me — don't — you don't 
 know. I should feel like Judas.' 
 
 1 Good-bye, then. Trust me.' And so they parted. 
 
 A tall man, with an iron-grey moustache and a soldier-lika
 
 122 Mount Eoyal. 
 
 bearing, caine out of a little study, cigarette in hand, as the 
 outer door closed on Christabel. ' Who the deuce is that 
 thoroughbred-looking girl ? ' asked this gentleman. ' Have you 
 got some of the neighbouring swells to call upon you, at last 1 
 Why, what's the row, Fishky, you've been ci> 'ng 1 ' 
 
 Fishky was the stage-carpenters', dressers', and super- 
 numeraries' pronunciation of the character which Miss Mayne 
 acted nightly, and had been sportively adopted by her inti- 
 mates as a pet name for herself. 
 
 ' That lady is Miss Courtenay.' 
 
 ' The lady Hamleigh is going to marry ? What the devil is 
 she doing in this galere ? I hope she hasn't been making herself 
 unpleasant 1 ' 
 
 1 She is an angel.' 
 
 ' With all my heart. Hamleigh is very welcome to her, so 
 long as he leaves me my dear little demon,' answered the soldier, 
 smiling down from his altitude of six feet two at the sylph-like 
 form in the Watteau gown. 
 
 ' Oh, how I wish I had never seen your face,' said Stella : ' I 
 should be almost a good woman, if there were no such person as 
 you in the world.' 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ' LET ME AND MY PASSIONATE LOVE GO BY.' 
 
 That second week of July was not altogether peerless 
 weather. It contained within the brief span of its seven days one 
 of those sudden and withering changes which try humanity more 
 than the hardest winter, with which every Transatlantic weather- 
 prophet threatened our island. The sultry heat of a tropical 
 Tuesday was followed by the blighting east wind of a chilly 
 Wednesday ; and in the teeth of that keen east wind, blowing 
 across the German Ocean, and gathering force among the Pent- 
 lands, Angus Hamleigh set forth from the cosy shelter of Hillside, 
 upon a long day's salmon fishing. 
 
 His old kinswoman's health had considerably improved since 
 his arrival ; but she was not yet so entirely restored to her normal 
 condition as to be willing that he should go back to London. Sho 
 pleaded with him for a few days more, and in order that the days 
 should not hang heavily on his hands, she urged him to make the 
 most of his Scottish holiday by enjoying a day or two's salmon 
 fishing. The first floods, which did not usually begin till August, 
 had already swollen the river, and the grilse and early autumn 
 salmon were running up ; according to Donald, the handy man 
 who helped in the gardens, and who was a first-rate fisherman.
 
 ' Let Me and my Passionate Love go by.' 123 
 
 'There's all yourain tackle upstairs in one o' the presses,' said 
 the old lady ; 'ye'll just find it ready to your hand.' 
 
 The offer was tempting — Angus had found the long summer 
 days pass but slowly in house and garden — albeit there was a 
 library of good old classics. He so longed to be hastening back 
 to Christabel — found the hours so empty and joyless without her. 
 He was an ardent fisherman — loving that leisurely face-to-face 
 contemplation of Nature which goes with rod and line. The 
 huntsman sees the landscape flash past him like a dream of grey 
 wintry beauty — it is no more to him than a picture in a gallery — 
 he has rarely time to feel Nature's tranquil charms. Even when 
 he must needs stand still for a while, he is devoured by impatience 
 to be scampering off again, and to see the world in motion. But 
 the angler has leisure to steep himself in the atmosphere of hill 
 and streamlet — to take Nature's colours into his soul. Every 
 angler ought to blossom into a landscape painter. But this 
 salmon fishing was not altogether a dreamy and contemplative 
 business. Quickness, presence of mind, and energetic action 
 were needed at some stages of the sport. The moment came 
 when Angus found his rod bending under the weight of a mag- 
 nificent salmon, and when it seemed a toss up between landing 
 his fish and being dragged under water by him. 
 
 ' J ump in,' cried Donald, excitedly, when the angler's line was 
 nearly expended, ' it's only up to your neck.' So Angus jumped 
 in, and followed the lightning-swift rush of the salmon down 
 stream, and then, turning him after some difficulty, had to follow 
 his prey up stream again, back to the original pool, where ho 
 captured him, and broke the top of his eighteen-foot rod. 
 
 Angus clad himself thiidy, because the almanack told him 
 it was summer — he walked far and fast — overheated himself — 
 waded for hours knee-deep in the river — his fishing-boots of 
 three seasons ago far from watertight — ate nothing all day — and 
 went back to Hillside at dusk, carrying the seeds of pneumonia 
 under his oilskin jacket Next day he contrived to crawl about 
 the gardens, reading 'Burton' in an idle desultory way that 
 suited so desultory a book, longing for a letter from Christabel, 
 and sorely tired of his Scottish seclusion. On the day after he 
 was laid up with a sharp attack of inflammation of the lungs, 
 attended by his aunt's experienced old doctor — a shrewd hard- 
 headed Scotchman, contemporary with Simpson, Sibson, Fergusson 
 ■ — all the brightest lights in the Caledonian galaxy — and nurs6d 
 by one of his aunt's old servants. 
 
 While he was in this condition there came a letter from 
 Christabel, a long letter, which he unfolded with eager trembling 
 hands, looking for joy and comfort in its pages. But, as he read, 
 his pallid cheek flushed with angry feverish carmine, and his 
 ehort hard breathing grew shorter and harder
 
 124 Mount Royal. 
 
 Yet the ietter expressed only tenderness. In tenderest words 
 his betrothed reminded him of past wrong-doing, and urged upon 
 him the duty of atonement. If this girl whom he had so 
 passionately loved a little while ago was from society's standpoint 
 ■Juworthy to be his wife — it was he who had made her unworthi- 
 ji ess — he w ho alone could redeem her from absolute shame and 
 disgrace. ' All the world knows that you wronged her, let all the 
 world know that you are glad to make such poor amends as may be 
 made for that wrong,' wrote Christabel. ' I forgive you all the 
 sorrow you have brought upon me : it was in a great measure my 
 own fault. I was too eager to link my life with yours. I almost 
 thrust myself upon you. I will revere and honour you all the 
 days of my life, if you will do right in this hard crisis of our fate. 
 Knowing -what I know I could never be happy as your wife : my 
 soul would be wrung with jealous fears ; I should never feel 
 secure of your love ; my life would be one long self -torment. It 
 is with this conviction that I tell you our engagement is ended, 
 Angus, loving you with all my heart. I have not come hurriedly 
 to this resolution. It is not of anybody's prompting. I have 
 prayed to my God for guidance. I have questioned my own 
 heart, and I believe that 1 have decided wisely and well. And 
 so farewell, dear love. May God and your conscience inspire 
 you to do right. 
 
 'Your ever constant friend, 
 
 ' Christabel Courtenay.' 
 . Angus Hamleigh's first impulse was anger. Then came a 
 softer feeling, and he saw all the nobleness of the womanly instinct 
 that had prompted this letter: a good woman's profound pity for 
 a fallen sister ; an innocent woman's readiness to see only the 
 poetical aspect of a guilty love ; an unselfish woman's desire that 
 right should be done, at any cost to herself. 
 
 'God bless her!' he murmured, and kissed the letter before 
 he laid it under his pillow. 
 
 His next thought was to telegraph immediately to Christabel. 
 He asked his nurse to bring him a telegraph form and a pencil, 
 and with a shaking hand began to write : — 
 
 ' No ! a thousand times no. I owe no allegiance to any one 
 but to you. There can be no question of broken faith with the 
 person of whom you write. I hold you to your promise.' 
 
 Scarcely had his feeble fingers scrawled the lines than he 
 tore up the paper. 
 
 ' I will see the doctor first,' he thought. ' Am I a man to 
 claim the fulfilment of a bright girl's promise of marriage 1 No, 
 I'll f^et the doctor's verdict before I send her a word.' 
 
 When the old family practitioner had finishe '. his soundings 
 and questionings, Angus asked him to stop for a few minutes 
 longer.
 
 • Lid Me and my Passionate Love go by.' 125 
 
 ' Yon say I'm better this afternoon, and that you'll get me 
 tfver this bout,' he said, ' and I believe you. But I want you tf 
 «o a little further and tell me what you think of my case from a 
 icneral point of view.' 
 
 'Humph,' muttered the doctor, 'it isn't easy to say wind 
 proportion of your seemptoms may" be temporary, and wnat 
 paircnenent ; but ye've a vairy shabby pair of lungs at this 
 praisent writing. "What's your family heestory V 
 
 ' My father died of consumption at thirty.' 
 
 ' Humph ! ainy other relative?' 
 
 ' My aunt, a girl of nineteen ; my father's mother, at seven- 
 and-twenty.' 
 
 ' Dear, dear, that's no vairy lively retrospaict. Is this your 
 fairst attack of heernorrage ? ' 
 
 1 Not by three or four.' 
 
 The good old doctor shook his head. 
 
 'Ye'll need to take extreme care of yourself,' he said: 'and 
 ye'll no be for spending much of your life in thees country. Ye 
 might do vairy weel in September and October at Rothsay or in 
 the' Isle of Arran, but I'd recommaind ye to winter in the South.' 
 
 ' Do you think I shall be a long-lived man V 
 
 ' My dear sir, that'll depend on care and circumstances beyond 
 human foresight. I couldn't conscientiously recommaind your 
 life to an Insurance Office.' 
 
 'Do you think that a man in my condition is justified in 
 marrying?' 
 
 ' Do ye want a plain answer 1 ' 
 
 ' The" plainest that you can give me.' 
 
 ' Then I tell you frankly that I think the marriage of a man 
 with a marked consumptive tendency, like yours, is a crime — a 
 crying sin, which is inexcusable in the face of modern science 
 and modern enlightenment, and our advanced knowledge of the 
 mainsprings of life and death. "What, sir, can it be less than a 
 crime to bring into this world children burdened with an 
 /ieredi.ary curse, destined to a heritage of weakness and pain- 
 bright young minds fettered by diseased bodies — born to perish 
 untimely? Mr. Hamleigh, did ye ever read a book called 
 "EcceHomo? 5 " 
 
 ' Yes, it is a book of books. I know it by heart.' 
 
 1 Then ye'll may be remaimber the writer's summing up of 
 practical Chreestianity as a seestem of ethics which in its ultimate 
 perfection will result in the happiness of the human race— even 
 that la<t enemy, Death, if not subdued, may be made to keep his 
 di.-tance, seemply by a due observance of natural laws — by an 
 unselfish forethought and regard in each number of the human 
 9pecies for the welfare of the multitude. The man who 1 econiea 
 the father of a race of puny children, can be no friend to
 
 ! _G Mount Royal. 
 
 humanity. ITe prcdcoms future suffering to the innocent by .1 
 reckless indulgence of his own inclination in the present.' 
 
 ' Yes, I believe you are right,' said Angus, with a despairing 
 (Sigh. ' It seems a hard thing for a man who loves, and is be- 
 loved by, the sweetest among women, to forego even for a few 
 brief years of perfect bliss, and go down lonely to the grave — to 
 accept this doctrine of renunciation, and count himself as one dead 
 in life. Yet a year ago I told myself pretty much what you have 
 told me to-day. I was tempted from my resolve by a woman's 
 loving devotion — and now — a crucial point has come — and I must 
 decide whether to marry or not.' 
 
 ' If you love humanity better than you love yourself, ye'll die 
 a bachelor,' said the Scotchman, gravely, but with infinite pity 
 in his shrewd old face ; ' ye've asked me for the truth, and I've 
 geeven it ye. Truth is often hard.' 
 
 Angus gave his thin hot hand to the doctor in token of friendly 
 feeling, and then silently turned hii face to the wall, whereupon 
 the doctor gently patted him upon the shoulder and left him. 
 
 Yes, it was hard. In the bright spring time, his health won- 
 drously restored by that quiet restful winter on the shores of the 
 Mediterranean, Angus had almost believed that he had given his 
 enemy the slip — that Death's dominion over him was henceforth 
 to be no more than over the common ruck of humanity, who, 
 knowing not when or how the fatal lot may fall from the urn, 
 drop into a habit of considering themselves immortal, and death 
 a calamity of which one reads in the newspapers with only 
 a kindly interest in other people's mortality. All through the 
 gay London season he had been so utterly happy, so wonderfully 
 well, that the insidious disease, which had declared itself in the 
 past by so many unmistakable symptoms, seemed to have relaxed 
 its grip upon him. He began to have faith in an advanced 
 medical science — the power to cure maladies hitherto considered 
 incurable. That long interval of languid empty days and nights 
 of placid sleep — the heavy sweetness of southern air breathing 
 over the fields of orange flowers and violets, February roses and 
 carnations, had brought strength and healing. The foe had been 
 baffled by the new care which his victim had taken of an exist- 
 ence that had suddenly become precious. 
 
 This was the hope that had buoyed up Angus Hamleigh's 
 spirits all through the happy spring-time and summer which he 
 Lad spent in the company of his betrothed. He had seen the 
 physician who less than a year before had pronounced his sentence 
 of doom, and the famous physician, taking the thing in the light- 
 hearted way of a man for whom humanity is a collection of 
 1 cases,' was jocose and congratulatory, full of wonder at his 
 patient's restoration, and taking credit to himself for having 
 recommended Hyeres. And now the esern^ had him by the
 
 ' Let Me and my Passionate Love go by.' 127 
 
 Ihroat The foe, no longer insidiously hinting at his deadly 
 meaning, held him in the tierce grip of pain and fever. Such an 
 attack as this, following upon one summer day's imprudence, 
 showed but too plainly by how frail a tie he clung to life — how 
 brief and how prone to malady must be the remnant of his days. 
 Before the post went out he re-read Christabel's letter, 
 smiling mournfully as he read. 
 
 ' Poor child ! ' he murmured to himself, ' God bless her for 
 her innocence — God bless her for her unselfish desire to do right. 
 Jf she only knew the truth — but, better that she should be spared 
 the knowledge of evil. What good end would it serve if I were 
 to enter upon painful explanations V 
 
 He had himself propped up with pillows, and wrote, in a 
 hand which he strove to keep from shaking, the following 
 lines : — 
 
 ' Dearest ! I accept your decree : not for the reasons which you 
 allege, which are no reasons ; but for other motives which it 
 would pain me too much to explain. I have loved you, I do love 
 you, better than my own joy or comfort, better than my own 
 life : and it is simply and wholly on that account I can resign 
 myself to say, let us in the future be friends — and friends only. 
 ' Your ever affectionate 
 
 'Angus Hamleigh.' 
 He was so much better next day as to be able to sit up for an 
 hour or two in the afternoon ; and during that time he wrote at 
 length to Mrs. Tregonell, telling her of his illness, and of his 
 conversation with the Scotch doctor, and the decision at which 
 he had arrived on the strength of that medical opinion, and 
 leaving her at liberty to tell Christabel as much, or as little of 
 this, as she thought fit. 
 
 ' I know you will do what is best for my darling's happiness,' 
 he said. 'If I did not believe this renunciation a sacred duty, 
 and the only means of saving her from infinite pain in the future, 
 nothing that she or even you could say about my past frolic? 
 would induce me to renounce her. I would fight that question 
 to the uttermost. But the other fatal fact is not to be faced, 
 except by a blind and cowardly selfishness which I dare not 
 practise.' 
 
 After this day, the invalid mended slowly, and old Miss 
 MacPherson, his aunt, being soon quite restored, Mr. Hamleigh 
 telegraphed to his valet to bring books and other necessaries from 
 his chambers in the Albany, and to meet him in the Isle of Arran, 
 uhere he meant to vegetate for the next month or two, chartering 
 a yacht of some kind, and living half on land and half on sea.
 
 128 Mount Royal. 
 
 CHAPTEK XI. 
 
 'ALAS FOR MS 1HEN, MY GOOD DAY3 ARE DONE. 
 
 Angcts Hamleigh's letter came upon Christabel like a torrent 
 of cold water, as if that bright silvery arc which pierces the rock 
 at St. Nectan's Kieve had struck upon her heart with its icj 
 stream, and chilled it into stone. All through that long summer 
 day upon which her letter must arrive at Hillside, she had lived 
 in nervous expectation of a telegram expressing indignation, 
 remonstrance, pleading, anger — a savage denial of her right to 
 renounce her lover — to break her engagement. She had made 
 up her mind in all good faith. She meant to go on to the bitter 
 end, in the teeth of her lover's opposition, to complete her renun- 
 ciation in favour of that frail creature who had so solemn a 
 claim upon Angus Hamleigh's honour. She meant to fight this 
 good fight — but she expected that the struggle would be hard 
 Oh, how long and dismal those summer hours seemed, which she 
 spent in her own room, trying to read, trying to comfort herself 
 with the saddest strains of classic melody, and always and through 
 all listening for the telegraph boy's knock at the hall door, or for 
 the sudden stopping of a hansom against the kerb, bringing home 
 her lover to remonstrate in person, in defiance of all calculations 
 of time and space. 
 
 There was no telegram. She had to wait nearly twenty-four 
 hours for the slow transit of the mails from the high latitude of 
 Inverness. And when she read Angus Hamleigh's letter — those 
 few placid words which so quietly left her free to take her own 
 way — her heart sank with a dull despair that was infinitely 
 worse than the keen agonies of the last few days. The finality 
 of that brief letter — the willingness to surrender her — the cold 
 indifference, as it seemed, to her future fate — was the hardest 
 blow of all. Too surely it confirmed all those humiliating 
 doubts which had tortured her since her discovery of that 
 wretched past. He had never really cared for her. It was she 
 who had forced him into an avowal of affection by her uncon- 
 scious revelation of love — she who, unmaidenly in her ignorance 
 of life and mankind, had been the wooer rather than the wooed. 
 
 'Thank God that my pride and my duty helped me to decide,' 
 she said to herself : ' what should I have done if I had married 
 him and found out afterwards how weak a hold I had upon his 
 heart — if he had told me one day that he had married me out of 
 pity.' 
 
 Christabel told Mrs. Tregonell she had written to Mr. 
 Hamleigh— she spoke of him only as Mr. Hamleigh now— and 
 had received his reply,, and that all was now over between them.
 
 'Alas for Me then, my Good Days are Done.' 129 
 
 •I want you to return his presents for me, Auntie,' she said. 
 1 They are too valuable to be sent to his chambers while he fc 
 away— the diamond necklace -which he gave me on my birthday 
 — just like that one I saw on the stage — I suppose he thinks all 
 vvomen have exactly the same ideas and fancies — the books 
 too—I w ill put them all together for you to return.' 
 
 ' He has given you a small library,' said Mrs. Tregonell. ' I 
 will take the things in the carriage, and see that they are 
 properly delivered. Don't be afraid, darling. You shall have 
 no trouble about them. My own dear girl— how brave and good 
 vou are— how wise too. Yes, Belle, I am convinced that you 
 Lave chosen wisely,' said the widow, with the glow of honest 
 conviction, for the woof of self-interest is so cunningly inter- 
 woven with the warp of righteous feeling that very few of us 
 can tell where the threads cross. 
 
 She drew her niece to her heart, and kissed her, and cried 
 with her a little ; and then said cheeringly, ' And now tell me, 
 darling, what you would like to do 1 We have ever so many 
 engagements for this week and the next fortnight— but you 
 know that they have been made only for your sake, and if you 
 don't care about them ' 
 
 ' Care about them ! Oh, Auntie, do you think I could go into 
 society wiih this dull aching pain at my heart ; I feel as if I 
 should never care to see my fellow-creatures again— except vou 
 and Jessie.' 
 
 And Leonard,' said the mother. ' Poor Leonard, who 
 could go through fire and water for you.' 
 
 Christabel winced, feeling fretfully that she did not want an j 
 one to go through fire and water ; a kind of acrobatic perform- 
 ance continually being volunteered by people who would hesitate 
 at the loan of five pounds. 
 
 ' Were shall we go, dear ? Would you not like to go abroad 
 for the Autumn— Switzerland, or Italy, for instance V suggested 
 Mr3. Tregonell, with an idea that three months on the Continent 
 was a specific in such cases. 
 
 ' No,' said Christabel, shudderingly, remembering how Angus 
 and his frail first love had been happy together in Italy— oh, 
 those books, those books, with their passionate record of past 
 joys, those burning lines from Byron and Heine, which expressed 
 such a world of feeling in ten syllables— ' No, I would ever so 
 much rather go back to Mount Boyal.' 
 
 1 My poor child, the place is so associated with Mr. Hamleigh. 
 Vou would be thinking of him every hour of the day.' 
 
 ' I shall do that anywhere.' 
 
 ' Change of scene would be so much better for you — travelling 
 —variety.' 
 
 ' Au?>tie, you are not strong enough to travel with comfort to 
 
 •«
 
 130 Mount Boyal. 
 
 yourself. I am not going to drag you about for a fanciful allev ia- 
 tion of my sorrow. The landscape may change but not the 
 m ind — I should think of — the past — just as much on Mont Blanc 
 as on Willapark. No, dearest, let us go home ; let me go back 
 to the old, old life, as it was before I saw Mr. Haiuleigh. Oh, 
 what a child I was in those dear days, how happy, how happy.' 
 She burst into tears, melted by the memory of those placid 
 days, the first tears she had shed since she received her lover's 
 answer. 
 
 ' And you will be happy again, dear. Don't you remember 
 that passage I read to you in " The Caxtons " a few days ago, 
 in which the wise tender-hearted father teli- his son how small a 
 space one great sorrow takes in a life, and how triumphantly the 
 life soars on beyond it 1 ?' 
 
 ' Yes, I remember ; but I didn't believe him then, and I be- 
 lieve him still less now,' answered Christabel, doggedly. 
 
 Major Bree called that afternoon, and found Mrs. Tregonell 
 alone in the drawing-room. 
 
 ' Where is Belle ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' She has gone for a long country ride — I insisted upon it.' 
 
 'You were quite right. She was looking as white as 
 a ghost yesterday when I just caught a glimpse of her in the 
 next room. She ran away like a guilty thing when she saw me. 
 Well, has this cloud blown over ? Is Hamleigh back 1 ' 
 
 ' No ; Christabel's engagement is broken oft'. It has been a 
 great blow, a severe trial ; but now it is over I am glad ; she 
 never could have been happy with him.' 
 
 ' How do you know that 1 ' asked the Major, sharply. 
 
 ' I judge him by his antecedents. What could be expected 
 from a man who had led that kind of life — a man who so grossly 
 deceived her 1 ' 
 
 1 Deceived her ? Did she ask him if he had ever been in love 
 with an actress 1 Did she or you ever interrogate him as to his 
 past life 1 Why you did not even question me, or I should have 
 been obliged to tell you all I knew of his relations with Miss 
 Mayne.' 
 
 ' You ought to have told me of your own accord. You should 
 not have waited to be questioned,' said Mrs. Tregonell, indig- 
 nantly. 
 
 ' Why should I stir dirty water 1 Do you suppose that every 
 jnan who makes a good husband and lives happily with his wife 
 has been spotless up to the hour of his marriage ? There is a 
 Sturm und Bra/iig period in every man's life, depend upon it 
 Far better that the tempest should rage before marriage than 
 after.' 
 
 ' I can't accept your philosophy, nor could Christabel. She 
 took the business into her own hands, bravely, nobly. She has
 
 • Grief a fixed Star, and Joy a Vane that veers. 131 
 
 cancelled her engagement, and left Mr. Hamleigh free to make 
 some kind of reparation to this actress person.' 
 
 ' Separation !— to Stella Mayne ? Why don't you know 
 that she is the mistress of Colonel Luscomb, who has ruined his 
 social and professional prospects for her sake. Do you mean to 
 say that old harpy who gave you your information about Angus 
 did not give you the epilogue to the play ? ' 
 
 ' Not a word,' said Mrs. Tregonell, considerably dashed by 
 this intelligence. ' But I don't see that this fact alters the case- 
 much. Christabel could never have been happy or at peace with 
 a man who had once been devoted to a creature of that class.' 
 
 ' Would you be surprised to hear that creatures of that class 
 are flesh and blood ; and that they love us and leave us, and 
 cleave to us and forsake us, just like the women in society ? ' 
 asked the Major, surveying her with mild scorn. 
 
 She was a good woman, no doubt, and acted honestly accord- 
 ing to her lights ; yet he was angry with her, believing that she 
 had spoiled two lives by her incapacity to take a wide and 
 liberal view of the human comedy. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 'grief a fixed star, and jot a vane that veers.' 
 
 They went back to the Cornish moors, and the good old manor- 
 house on the hill above the sea ; went back to the old life, just 
 the same, in all outward seeming, as it had been before that 
 fatal visit which had brought love and sorrow to Christabel. 
 How lovely the hills looked in the soft summer light ; how un- 
 speakably fair the sea in all its glory of sapphire and emerald, 
 and those deep garnet-coloured patches which show where the 
 red sea- weed lurks below, with its pinnacles of rock and colonies 
 of wild living creatures, gull and cormorant, basking in the sun. 
 Little Boscastle, too, gay with the coming and going of many 
 tourists, the merry music of the guard's horn, as the omnibus 
 came jolting down the hill from Bodmin, or the coach wound up 
 the hilt to Bude ; busy with the bustle of tremendous experi- 
 ments with rockets and life-saving apparatus in the soft July 
 darkness ; noisy with the lowing of cattle and plaintive tremolo 
 of sheep in the market-place, and all the rude pleasures of a 
 rural fair; alive with all manner of sound and movement, and 
 having a general air of making money too fast for the capability 
 of investment. The whole place was gorged with visitors — not 
 the inn only, but every available bed-chamber at post-office, shop, 
 and cottage was filled with humanity ; and the half-dozen or so
 
 132 Mount Royal. 
 
 available pony-carriages were making the journey to Tintagel 
 and back three times a day ; while the patient investigators who 
 tramped to St. Nectan's Kieve, without the faintest idea of who 
 St. Nectan was, or what a kieve was, or what manner of local 
 curiosity they were going to see, were legion ; all coming back 
 ravenous to the same cozy inn to elbow one another in friendly 
 contiguity at the homely table d'hote, in the yellow light of many 
 caudles. 
 
 Chris tabel avoided the village as much as possible during this 
 gay season. She would have avoided it just as much had it been 
 the dull season : the people she shrank from meeting were not 
 the strange tourists, but the old gaffers and goodies who had 
 known her all their lives — the 'uncles' and 'aunts' — (in 
 Cornwall uncle and aunt are a kind of patriarchal title given to 
 honoured age) — and who might consider themselves privileged 
 to ask why her wedding was deferred, and when it was to be. 
 
 She went with Jessie on long lonely expeditions by sea and 
 land. She had half a dozen old sailors who were her slaves, 
 always ready to take her out in good weather, deeming it their 
 highest privilege to obey so fair a captain, and one who always 
 paid them handsomely for their labour. They went often to 
 Trebarwith Sands, and sat there in some sheltered nook, working 
 and reading at peace, resigned to a life that had lost all its 
 brightness and colour. 
 
 ' Do you know, Jessie, that I feel like an old maid of fifty?' 
 said Belle on one of those rare occasions when she spoke of her 
 own feelings. ' It seems to me as if it were ages since I made 
 up my mind to live and die unmarried, and to make life, some- 
 how or other, self-sufficing — as if Randie and I were both 
 getting old and grey together. For he is ever so much greyer, 
 the dear thing,' she said, laying her hand lovingly on the honest 
 black head and grey muzzle. ' What a pity that dogs should 
 grow old so soon, when we are so dependent on their love. Why 
 are they not like elephants, in whose lives a decade hardly 
 counts 1 ' 
 
 1 Oh, Belle, Belle, as if a beautiful woman of twenty could be 
 dependent on a sheep-dog's affection — when she has all her life 
 before her and all the world to choose from.' 
 
 ' Perhaps you think 1 could change my lover as some people 
 change their dogs,' said Belle, bitterly, ' be deeply attached to a 
 colley this year and next year be just as devoted to a spaniel. 
 My affections are not so easily transferable.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell had told her niece nothing of Angus 
 Hamleigh's final letter to herself. He had given her freedom to 
 communicate as much or as little of that letter as she liked to 
 Christabel— and she had taken the utmost license, and had been 
 altogether silent about it What good could it do fo;" Christabel
 
 1 Grief a Fixed Star, and Joy a Vane that veers.' 133 
 
 to hear of Ms illness. The knowledge might inspire her to some 
 wild quixotic act ; she might insist upon devoting herself to him 
 — to be his wife in order that she might be his nurse — and surely 
 this would be to ruin her life without helping him to prolong hi*:. 
 The blow had fallen — the sharpest pain of this sudden sorrow had 
 been suffered. Time and youth, and Leonard's faithful love would 
 bring swift healing. 'How I loved and grieved for his father,' 
 thought Mrs. Tregonell, ' Yet I survived his loss, and had a 
 peaceful happy life with the best and kindest of men.' 
 
 A peaceful happy life, yes — the English matron's calm content 
 in a handsome house and a well organized household— a good 
 stable — velvet gowns — family diamonds — the world's respect. 
 But that first passionate love of youth — the love that is eager for 
 self-sacrifice, that would welcome beggary — the love which sees 
 a lover independent of all surrounding circumstances, worship- 
 ping and deifying the man himself — that sacred flame had been 
 for ever extinguished in Diana Champernowne's heart before she 
 met burly broad-shouldered Squire Tregonell at the county ball. 
 
 She wrote to Leonard telling him what had happened, and 
 that he might now count on the fulfilment of that hope which 
 they both had cherished years ago. She asked him to come 
 home at once, but to be careful that he approached Christabel 
 only in a friendly and cousinly character, until there had been 
 ample time for these new wounds to heal. 
 
 ' She bears her trouble beautifully, and is all goodness and 
 devotion to me — for I have been weak and ailing ever since I 
 came from London — but I know the trial is very hard for her. 
 The house would be more cheerful if you were at home. You 
 might ask one or two of your Oxford friends. No one goes into 
 the billiard-room now. Mount Eoyal is as quiet as a prison. 
 If you do not come soon, dear boy, I think we shall die of 
 melancholy.' 
 
 Mr. Tregonell did not put himself out of the way to comply 
 with his loving mother's request. By the time the widow's letter 
 reached him he had made his jjlans for the winter, and was not 
 disposed to set them aside in order to oblige a lady who was 
 only a necessary detail in his life. A man must needs have a 
 mother ; and, as mothers go, Mrs. Tregonell had been harmless 
 and inoffensive ; but she was not the kind of person for whom 
 Leonard would throw over elaborate sporting arrangements, 
 hired guides, horses, carts, and all the paraphernalia needful for 
 Red River explorations. As for Christabel, Mr. Tregonell had 
 not forgiven her for having set another man in the place which 
 he, her cousin and boyish loyish lover in a rough tryannica) way, 
 had long made up his mind to occupy. The fact that she had 
 broken with the man was a redeeming feature in the case ; but 
 Ije was not goincj into raptures about it ; nor was he disposed tq
 
 134 Mount Royal. 
 
 return to Mount Royal while she was still moping and regretting 
 the discarded lover. 
 
 ' Let her get over the doldrums, and then she and I may be 
 friends again,' said Leonard to his boon companion, Jack 
 Vandeleur, not a friend of his University days, but an acquain- 
 tance picked up on board a Cunard steamer — son of a half-pay 
 naval captain, a man who had begun life in a line regiment, 
 fought in Afghanistan, sold out, and lived by his wits and upon 
 his friends for the last five years. He had made himself so use- 
 ful to Mr. Tregonell by his superior experience as a traveller, his 
 pluck and knowledge of all kinds of sport, that he had been able 
 to live at free quarters with that gentleman from an early stage 
 of their acquaintance. 
 
 Thus it was that Christabel was allowed to end the year in 
 quietness and peace. Every one was tender and gentle with her, 
 knowing how keenly she must have suffered. There was much 
 disappointment among her country friends at the sorry ending 
 of her engagement ; more especially among those who had been 
 in London during the season, and had seen the lovely Cornish 
 debutante in her brief day of gladness. No one hinted a question 
 to Christabel herself. The subject of marrying and giving in 
 marriage was judiciously avoided in her presence. But Mrs. 
 Tregonell had been questioned, and had explained briefly that 
 certain painful revelations concerning Mr. Hamleigh's antecedents 
 had constrained Christabel to give him up. Every one said it 
 was a pity. Poor Miss Courtenay looked ill and unhappy. 
 Surely it would have been wiser to waive all question of ante- 
 cedents, and to trust to that sweet girl's influence for keeping 
 Mr. Hamleigh straight in the future. ' Antecedents, indeed,' 
 exclaimed a strong-minded matron, with live marriageable 
 daughters. ' It is all very well for a young woman like Miss 
 Courtenay — an only child, with fifteen hundred a year in her own 
 light — to make a fuss about a youug man's antecedents. But 
 what would become of my five girls if I were to look at things 
 so closely.' Christabel looked at the first column of the Times 
 supplement daily to see if there were the advertisement of Angus 
 Hamleigh's marriage with Stella Mayne. She was quite prepared 
 to read such an announcement. Surely, now that she had set 
 him free, he would make this act of atonement, he, in all whose 
 sentiments she had perceived so nice a sense of honour. But no 
 such advertisement appeared. It was possible, however, that the 
 marriage had taken place without any public notification. Mr. 
 Hamleigh might not care to call the world to witness his repara- 
 tion. She prayed for him daily and nightly, praying that he 
 might be led to do that which was best for his soul's welfare 
 — for his peace here and hereafter — praying that his days, whether 
 few or many, should be made happy.
 
 ' Grief a Fixed Star, and Joy a Vane that veers.' 13-b 
 
 There were times when that delicate reticence which made 
 Angus Hamleigh's name a forbidden sound upon the lips of her 
 friends, was a source of keenest pain to Christabel. It woidd 
 have been painful to her to hear that name lightly spoken, no 
 doubt ; but this dull dead silence was worse. One day it Hashed 
 upon her that if he were to die nobody would tell her of his 
 death. Kindred and friends would conspire to keep her un- 
 informed. After this she read the list of deaths in the Times 
 as eagerly as she read the marriages, but with an agony of 
 fear lest that name, if written in fire, should leap out upon the 
 page. 
 
 At last this painful sense of uncertainty as to the fate of 
 one who , a few months ago, had been a part of her lif e, became 
 unend arable. Pride withheld her from questioning her aunt 
 or Jessie. She shrank from seeming small and mean in the sight 
 of her own sex. She had made her sacrifice of her own accord, 
 and there was a poverty of character in not being able to 
 maintain the same Spartan courage to the end. But from Major 
 Bree, the friend and playfellow of her childhood, the indulgent 
 companion of her youth, she could better bear to accept pity — 
 so, one mild afternoon in the beginning of October, when the 
 Major dropped in at his usual hour for tea and gossip, she took 
 him to see the chrysanthemums, in a house on the further side 
 of the lawn ; and here, having assured herself there was no 
 gardener within hearing, she took courage to question him. 
 
 ' Uncle Oliver,' she began, falteringly, trifling with the 
 fringed petals of a snowy blossom, ' I want to ask you some- 
 thing.' 
 
 ' My dear, I think you must know that there is nothing in 
 the world I would not do for you.' 
 
 ' I am sure of that ; but this is not very difficult. It is only 
 to answer one or two questions. Every one here is very good to 
 me — but they make one mistake : they think becaused have broken 
 for ever — with — Mr. Hamleigh, that it can do me no good to know 
 anything about him — that I can go on living and being happy, 
 while I am as ignorant of his fate as if we were inhabitants of 
 different planets. But they forget that after having been all 
 the work! to me he cannot all at once become nothing. I have 
 still some faint interest in his fate. It hurts me like an actual 
 pain not to know whether he is alive or dead,' she said, with a 
 sudden sol). 
 
 ' My poor pet !' murmured the Major, taking her hand in 
 both liia own. 'Have you heard nothing about him since you 
 left London?' 
 
 'Not one word. People make believe that there was nevei 
 any such person in this world.' 
 
 ' They think it wiser to do so, in the hope you will forcfef him.'
 
 136 Mount Boyal. 
 
 1 They might as well hope that I shall become a blackamoor, 1 
 said Christabel, scornfully. ' You have more knowledge of the 
 human heart, Uncle Oliver — and you must know that I shall 
 always remember him. Tell me the truth about him just 
 this once, and I will not mention his name again for a long, 
 long time. He is not dead, is he 1 ' 
 
 ' Dead ! no, Belle. What put such a notion into your head 1 ' 
 
 1 Silence always seems like death ; and every one has kept 
 silence about him.' 
 
 ' He was ill while he was in Scotland — a touch of the old 
 complaint. I heard of him at Plymouth the other day, from a 
 yachting man who met him in the Isle of Arran, after his 
 illness — he was all right then, I believe.' 
 
 ' 111 — and I never knew of it — dangerously ill, perhaps.' 
 
 ' I don't suppose it was anything very bad. He had been 
 yachting when my Plymouth acquaintance met him.' 
 
 ' He has not married — that person,' faltered ChristabeL 
 
 ' What person 1 ' 
 
 'Miss Mayne.' 
 
 'Good heavens, no, my dear — nor ever will,' 
 
 'But he ought — it is his duty.' 
 
 ' My dear child, that is a question which I can hardly discuss 
 with you. But I may tell you, at least, that there is an all- 
 sufficient reason why Angus Hamleigh would never make such 
 an idiot of himself.' 
 
 'Do you mean that she could never be worthy of him — that 
 she is irredeemably wicked ?' asked Christabel. , 
 
 ' She is not good enough to be any honest man's wife.' 
 
 'And yet she did not seem wicked ; she spoke of him with 
 such intense feeling.' 
 
 ' She seemed — she spoke ! ' repeated the Major aghast. ' Do 
 you mean to tell me that you have seen — that you have conversed 
 with her ? ' 
 
 ' Yes : when my aunt told me the story which she heard 
 from Lady Cumberbridge I could not bring myself to believe it 
 until it was confirmed by Miss Mayne's own lips. I made up 
 my mind that I would go and see her — and I went. Was that 
 wrong 1 ' 
 
 ' Very wrong. You ought not to have gone near her. If 
 you wanted to know more than common rumour could tell you, 
 you should have sent me — your friend. It was a most unwise 
 act.' 
 
 'I thought I was doing my duty. I think so still,' said 
 Christabel, looking at him with frank steadfast eyes. ' We are 
 both women. If we stand far apart it is because Providence 
 has given me many blessings which were withheld from her. 
 It is Mr. Hamleigh's duty to repair the wrong he has done. If
 
 1 Grief a Fixed Star, and Joy a Vane that veers.- 137 
 
 he does not he must be answerable to his Maker for the 
 eternal ruin of a soul.' 
 
 'I teR you again, my dear, that you do not understand 
 the circumstances, and cannot fairly judge the case. You 
 would have done better to take an old soldier's advice before 
 you let the venomous gossip of that malevolent harridan spoil 
 two lives.' 
 
 'I did not allow myself to be governed by Lady Cumbsr- 
 bridge's gossip, Uncle Oliver. I took nothing for granted. It 
 was not till I had heard the truth from Miss Mayne's lips that 
 I took any decisive step. Mr. Hamleigh accepted my resolve so 
 readily that I can but think it was a welcome release.' 
 
 ' My dear, you went to a queer shop for truth. If you had 
 only known your way about town a little better you would have 
 thought twice before you sacrificed your own happiness in the 
 hope of making Miss Mayne a respectable member of society. 
 But what's done cannot be undone. There's no use in crying 
 over spilt milk. I daresay you and Mr. Hamleigh will meet ag tin 
 and make up your quarrel before we are a year older. In the 
 meantime don't fret, Belle — and don't be afraid that he will ever 
 marry any one but you. I'll be answerable for his constancy.' 
 
 The anniversary of Christabel's betrothal came round, St. 
 Luke's Day — a grey October day — with a drizzling West-country 
 rain. She went to church alone, for her aunt was far from well, 
 and Miss Bridgeman stayed at home to keep the invalid com- 
 pany — to read to her and cheer her through the long dull 
 morning. Perhaps they both felt that Christabel would rather 
 be alone on this day. She put on her waterproof coat, took 
 her dog with her, and started upon that wild lonely walk to 
 the church in the hollow of the hills. Bandie was a beast of 
 perfect manners, and would lie quietly in the porch all through 
 the service, waiting for his mistress. 
 
 She knelt alone just where they two had knelt together. 
 Thare was the humble altar before which they were to have 
 been married ; the rustic shrine of which they had so often 
 spoken as the fittest place for a loving union — fuller of tender 
 meaning than splendid St. 'George's, with its fine oaken panel- 
 ling, painted windows, and Hogarthian architecture. Never at 
 that altar nor at any other were they two to kneel. A little 
 year had held all — her hopes and fears — her triumphant love — 
 joy beyond expression — and sadness too deep for tears. She 
 went over the record as she knelt in the familiar pew — her 
 lips moving automatically, repeating the responses — her eyes 
 fixed and tearless. 
 
 Then when the service was over she went slowly wandering 
 in and out among the graves, looking at the grey slate tablets, 
 with the names of those whom she had known in life, all at
 
 138 Mount Royal. 
 
 rest now — old people who li;ul sulFered long and patiently before 
 they died — a fair young girl who had died of consumption, and 
 whose sufferings had been sharper than those of age — a sailor 
 who had gone out to a ship with a rope one desperate night, 
 and had given his life to save others — all at rest now. 
 
 There was no grave being dug to-day. She remembered 
 how, as &he and Angus lingered at the gate, the dull sound of 
 the earth thrown from the grave; ligger's spade had mixed with 
 the joyous song of the robin perched on the gate. To-day there 
 ivas neither gravedigger nor robin — only the soft drip, drip of 
 the rain on dock and thistle, fern and briony. She had the 
 churchyard all to herself, the dog following her about meekly, 
 crawling over grassy mounds, winding in and out among the 
 long wet grass. 
 
 ' When I die, if you have the ordering of my funeral, be 
 sure I am buried in Minster Churchyard.' 
 
 That is what Angus had said to her one summer morning, 
 when they were sitting on the Maidenhead coach ; and even 
 West-End London, and a London Park, looked lovely in the 
 clear June light. Little chance now that she would be called 
 upon to choose his resting-place — that her 1 sands would fold his 
 in their last meek attitude of submission to the universal 
 conqueror. 
 
 ' Perhaps he will spend his life in Italy, where no one will 
 know his wife's history,' thought Christabel, always believing, 
 in spite of Major Bree's protest, that her old lover would sooner 
 or later make the one possible atonement for an old sin 
 Nobody except the Major had told her how little the lady 
 deserved that such atonement should be made. It was Mrs. 
 Tregonell's theory that a well-brought up young woman should 
 be left in darkest ignorance of the darker problems of life. 
 
 Christabel walked across the hill, and down by narrow 
 winding ways into the valley, where the river, swollen and 
 turbid after the late rains, tumbled noisily over rock and root 
 and bent the long reeds upon its margin. She crossed the 
 narrow footbridge, and went slowly through the level fields 
 between two long lines of hills — a gorge through which, in bleak 
 weather, the winds blew fiercely. There was another hill to 
 ascend before she reached the field that led to Pentargon Bay 
 — half a mile or so of high road between steep banks and tall 
 unkempt hedges. How short and easy to climb that hill had 
 seemed to her in Angus Hamleigh's company ! Now she 
 walked wearily and slowly under the softly falling rain, won- 
 dering where he was, and whether he remembered this day. 
 
 She could recall every word that he had spoken, and the 
 memory was full of pain ; for in the light of her new knowledge 
 it seemed to her that all he had said about his early doom had
 
 • Grief a Fixed Star, and Joy a Vane that veers.' 139 
 
 been an argument intended to demonstrate to her why he dared 
 not ami must not ask her to be his wife — an ipologv and an 
 explanation as it were — and this apology, this explanation had 
 been made necessary by her own foolishness — by that fatal for- 
 getfulness of self-respect which had allowed her love to reveal 
 itself. And yet, surely that look of rapture which had shone in 
 his eyes as he clasped her to his heart, as he accepted the dedica- 
 tion of her young life, those tender tones, and all the love that 
 had come afterwards could not have been entirely falsehood. 
 
 • I cannot believe that he was a hypocrite,' she said, standing 
 where they two had sat side by side in the sunlight of that 
 lovely day, gazing at the grey sea, smooth as a lake under the 
 low grey sky. ' I think he must have loved me — unwillingly, 
 perhaps — but it was true love while it lasted. He gave his first 
 and best love to that other — but he loved me too. If I had 
 dared to believe him — to trust in my power to keep him. But 
 no ; that would have been to confirm him in wrong-doing. H 
 was his duty to marry the girl he wronged.' 
 
 The thought that her sacrifice had been made to principle 
 rather than to feeling sustained her in this hour as nothing elso 
 could have done. If she could only know where he was, and 
 how he fared, and wdiat he meant to do with his future life, she 
 could be happier, she thought. 
 
 Luncheon was over when Christabel went back to Mount 
 Royal ; but as Mrs. Tregonell was too ill to take anything 
 beyond a cup of beef tea in her own room, this fact was of no 
 consequence. The mistress of Mount Royal had been declining 
 visibly since her return to Cornwall ; Mr, Treherne, the family 
 doctor, told Christabel there was no cause for alarm, but he 
 hinted also that her aunt was not likely to be a long-lived woman 
 
 ' I'm afraid she worries herself,' he said ; c she is too anxious 
 about that scapegrace son of hers.' 
 
 'Leonard is very cruel,' answered Christabel ; ' he lets weeks 
 and even months go by without writing, and that makes his poor 
 mother miserable. She is perpetually worrying herself about 
 imaginary evils — storm and shipwreck, runaway horses, ex- 
 plosions on steamboats.' 
 
 'If she would but remember a vulgar adage, that "Nought 
 is never in danger," muttered the doctor, with whom Leonard had 
 been no favourite. 
 
 'And then she has frightful dreams about him,' said 
 Christabel. 
 
 ' My dear Miss Courtenay, I know all about it,' answered Mr. 
 Treherne; 'your dear aunt is Justin that comfortable position 
 of life in which a woman must woiry herself about something or 
 other. " Man was born to trouble," don't you know, my dear ( 
 The people who haven't real cares are constrained to invent sham
 
 140 Mount Boyal. 
 
 ones. Look at King Solomon — did you ever read any book that 
 breathes such intense melancholy in every lino as that little 
 work of his called Ecclesiastes 1 Solomon was living in the lap of 
 luxury when he wrote that little book, and very likely hadn't a 
 trouble in this world. However, imaginary cares can kill as 
 well a3 the hardest realities, so you must try to keep up your 
 aunt's spirits, and at the same time be sure that she doesn't over- 
 exert herself. She has a weak heart — what we call a tired heart.' 
 
 ' Does that mean heart-disease ?' faltered Christabel, with a 
 despairing look 
 
 ' Well, my dear, it doesn't mean a healthy heart. It is not 
 organic disease — nothing wrong with the valves — no fear of 
 excruciating pains — but it's a rather risky condition of life, and 
 needs care.' 
 
 ' I will be careful,' murmured the girl, with white lips, as the 
 awful shadow of a grief, hardly thought of till this moment, 
 fell darkly across her joyless horizon. 
 
 Her aunt, her adopted mother — mother in all sweetest care 
 and love and thoughtful culture — might too soon be taken from 
 her. Then indeed, and then only, could she kuow what it was 
 to be alone. Keenly, bitterly, she thought how little during the 
 last dismal months she had valued that love — almost as old as 
 her life — and how the loss of a newer love had made the world 
 desolate for her, life without meaning or purpose. She re- 
 membered how little more than a year ago — before the coming 
 of Angus Hamleigh — her aunt and she had been all the world 
 to each other, that tender mother-love all sufficing to fill her life 
 with interest and delight. 
 
 In the face of this new fear that sacred love resumed its old 
 place in her mind. Not for an hour, not for a moment of the 
 days to come, should her care or her affection slacken. Not for 
 a moment should the image of him whom she had loved and 
 renounced come between her and her duty to her aunt. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 'love will have nis day.' 
 
 From this time Christabel brightened and grew more like 
 her old self. Mrs. Tregonell told herself that the sharp 
 sorrow was gradually wearing itself out. No girl with 
 euch happy surroundings as Christabel's could go on being 
 unhappy for ever. Her own spirits improved with Christabel's 
 increasing brightness, and the old house began to lose its dismal 
 air. Until now the widow's conscience had been ill at ease — 
 she had been perpetually arguing with herself that she had done 
 right — trying to stifle doubts that continually renewed them-
 
 % Love will have his day.' 141 
 
 vives. But now she told herself that the time of sorrow wag 
 
 East, and that her wisdom would be justified by its fruits. She 
 ad no suspicion that her niece was striving of set purpose to be 
 cheerful — that these smiles and this bright girlish talk were the 
 result of painful effort, duty triumphing over sorrow. 
 
 Mount Royal that winter seemed one of the brightest, most 
 hospitable houses in the neighbourhood. There'were no parties ; 
 Mrs. Tregonell'a delicate health was a reason against that. But 
 there was generally some one staying in the house — some nice 
 girl, whose vivacious talk and whose new music helped to beguile 
 the mother from sad thoughts about her absent son — from 
 wearying doubts as to the fulfilment of her plans for the future. 
 There were people coming and going ; old friends driving 
 twenty miles to luncheon, and sometimes persuaded to stay to 
 dinner ; nearer neighbours walking three miles or so to afternoon 
 tea. The cheery rector of Trevalga and his family, friends of 
 twenty years' standing, were frequent guests. Mis. Tregonell was 
 not allowed to excite herself, but she was never allowed to be 
 dull. Christabel and Jessie watched her with unwavering 
 attention — anticipating every wish, preventing every fatigue. A 
 weak and tired heart might hold out for a long time under such 
 tender treatment. 
 
 But early in March there came an unexpected trial, in the 
 Bhap<i of a sudden and great joy. Leonard, who had never 
 learnt the rudiments of forethought and consideration for others, 
 drove up to the house one afternoon in an hired chaise from 
 Launceston, just as twilight was creeping over the hills, and 
 dashed unannounced into the room where his mother and the 
 two girls were sitting at tea. 
 
 ' Who is this 1 ' gasped Mrs. Tregonell, starting up from 
 her low easy *.hair, as the tall broad-shouldered man. bearded, 
 bronzed, clad in a thick grey coat and big white muffler, stood 
 before her ; and then with a shriek she cried, ' My son ! My 
 son ! ' and fell upon his breast. 
 
 When he placed her in a chair a minute later she was almost 
 fainting, and it was some moments before she recovered speech, 
 (..'hiistabel and Jessie thought the shock would have killed her. 
 
 'Oh, Leonard! how could you?' murmured Christabel, 
 reproachfully. 
 
 ' How could I do what ? ' 
 
 ' Come home without one word of notice, knowing your 
 mother's delicate health.' 
 
 ' I thought it would be a pleasant surprise for her. Besides 
 I hadn't made up my mind to come straight home till two 
 o'clock to day. I had half a mind to take a week in town first, 
 before I came to this God-forsaken hole. You stare at me as if 
 1 had no right to be here at all. Belle.'
 
 142 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' Leonard, my boy, my boy,' faltered the mother, with pale lips, 
 looking up adoringly at the bearded face, so weather-beaten, so 
 1 1 mlened and altered from the fresh lines of youth. 'If you 
 knew how I have longed for this hour. I have had such fears. You 
 have been in such perilous places — among savages — in all kinda 
 of danger. Often and often I have dreamt that I saw you dead. 
 
 ' Upon my soul, this is a lively welcome,' said Leonard. 
 
 ' My dearest, I don't want to be dismal,' said Mrs. Tregonell, 
 with a faint hysterical laugh. Her heart was beating tumul- 
 luously, the hands that clasped her son's were cold and damp. 
 ' My soul is full of joy. How changed you are dear ! You 
 look as if you had gone through great hardships.' 
 
 ' Life in the Rockies isn't all child's play, mother, but we've 
 had a jolly time of it, on the whole. America is a magnificent 
 country. I feel deuced sorry to come home — except for the 
 pleasure of seeing you and Belle. Let's have a look at you 
 Belle, and see if you are as much changed as I am. Step into 
 •die light, young lady.' 
 
 He drew her into the full broad light of a heaped-up wood 
 and coal fire. There was very little daylight in the room. The 
 tapestry curtains fell low over the heavily mullioned Tudor win- 
 dows, and inside the tapestry there was a screen of soft muslin. 
 
 'I have not been shooting moose and skunk, or living in a 
 tent,' said Christabel, with a forced laugh. She wanted to be 
 amiable to her cousin — wished even to like him, but it went 
 against the grain. She wondered if he had always been as 
 hateful as this. ' You can't expect to find much difference in 
 me after three years' vegetation in Cornwall.' 
 
 'But you've not been vegetating all the time, said Leonard, 
 looking her over as coolly as if she had been a horse. ' You 
 have had a season in London. I saw your name in some of the 
 gossiping journals, when I was last at Montreal. You wore a 
 pink gown at Sandown. You were one of the prettiest girls at 
 the Royal Fancy fair. You wore white and tea roses at the 
 Marlborough House garden party. You have been shining in 
 high places, Mistress Belle. I hope it has not spoiled you for a 
 country life.' 
 
 ' I love the country better than ever. I can vouch for that.' 
 
 ' And you have grown ever so much handsomer since I sa<r 
 you last. I can vouch for that,' answered her cousin with hi* 
 free and easy air. ' How d'ye do, Miss Bridgeman ? ' he said, 
 holding out two fingers to his mother's companion, whoso 
 presence he had until this moment ignored. 
 
 Jessie remembered Thackeray's advice, and gave the squire 
 one finger in return for his two. 
 
 1 You're not altered,' he said, looking at her with a steady 
 stare. ' You're the hard-wearing sort, warranted fast colour,'
 
 ' Love will have Ms clay* 14$ 
 
 'Give Leonard some tea, Jessie,' said Mrs. Tregonell. ' I'm 
 sure you would like some tea? 5 looking lovingly at the tall 
 figure, the hard handsome face. 
 
 'I'd rather have a brandy-and-soda,' answered Leonard, 
 carelessly, ' but I don't mind a cup of tea presently, when I've 
 been and had a look round the stables and kennels.' 
 
 ' Oh, Leonard ! surely not yet ?' said Mrs. Tregonell. 
 
 ' Not yet ! "Why, I've been in the house ten minutes, and 
 
 you may suppose I want to know how my hunters have been 
 
 •getting on in the last three years, and whether the colt Nicholls 
 
 bred is good for anything. I'll just take a hurried look round 
 
 and be back again slick.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell sighed and submitted. What could she do 
 but submit to a son who had had his own way and followed his 
 own pleasure ever since he could run alone ; nay, had roared 
 and protested loudly at every attack upon his liberty when he 
 was still in the invertebrate jelly-fish stage of existence, carried 
 at full length in his nurse's arms, with his face turned to the 
 ceiling, perpetually contemplating that flat white view of indoor 
 existence which must needs have a depressing influence upon 
 the meditations of infancy. The mothers of spirited youths 
 have to fulfil their mission, which is for the most part submission. 
 
 ' How well he looks ! ' she said, fondly, when the squire 
 had hurried out of the room ; ' and how he has broadened and 
 filled out.' 
 
 Jessie Bridgeman thought within herself that he was quite 
 broad enough before he went to America, and that this filling- 
 out process had hardly improved him, but she held her peace. 
 
 ' He looks very strong,' said Christabel. ' I could fancy 
 Hercules just such a man. I wonder whether he has brought 
 home any lions' hides, and if he will have one made into a 
 shooting jacket. Dear, dearest Auntie,' she went on, kneeling 
 by the widow's chair, ' I hope you &re quite happy now. I 
 hope your cup of bliss is full.' 
 
 'I am very happy, sweet one ; but the cup is not full yet. 
 I hope it may be before I die — full to overflowing, and that I 
 shall be able to say, " Lord, let me depart in peace," with a 
 glad and grateful heart.' 
 
 Leonard came back from the stables in a rather gloomy 
 mood. His hunters did not look as well as he expected, and 
 the new colt was weak and weedy. ' Nicholls ought to have 
 known better than to breed such a thing, but I suppose he'd 
 say, like the man in Tristram Shandy, that it wasn't his fault,' 
 grumbled Mr. Tregonell, as he seated himself in front of the 
 fire, with his feet on the brass fender. He wore clump-soled 
 boots and a rough heather-mixture shooting suit, with knicker- 
 bockers and coarse stockings, and his whole aspect was ' sport-
 
 144 Mount Royal. 
 
 ing.' Christabel thought of some one else who had sat before 
 the same hearth in the peaceful twilight hour, and wondered 
 if the spiritual differences between these two men were as wide 
 as those of manner and outward seeming. She recalled the 
 exquisite refinement of that other man, the refinement of the man 
 who is a born dandy, who, under the most adverse circumstances, 
 compelled to wear old clothes and to defy fashion, would yet be 
 always elegant and refined of aspect. She remembered that 
 outward grace which seemed the natural indication of a poetical 
 mind — a grace which never degenerated into effeminacy, a 
 refinement which never approached the feeble or the lacka- 
 daisical. 
 
 Mr. Tregonell stretched his large limbs before the blaze, 
 and made himself comfortable in the spacious plush-covered 
 chair, throwing back his dark head upon a crewel anti-macassar, 
 which was a work of art almost as worthy of notice as a water- 
 colour painting, so exquisitely had the flowers been copied from 
 Nature by the patient needlewoman. 
 
 ' This is rather more comfortable than the Rockies,' he said, 
 as he stirred his tea, with big broad hands, scratched and scarred 
 with hard service. ' Mount Boyal isn't half a bad place for two 
 or three months in the year. But I suppose you mean to go to 
 London after Easter 1 Now Belle has tasted blood she'll be all 
 agog for a second plunge. Sandown will be uncommonly jolly 
 this year.' 
 
 ' No, we are not going to town this season.' 
 
 ' Why not 1 Hard up — spent all the dollars 1 ' 
 
 ' No, but I don't think Belle would care about it.' 
 
 ' That's bosh. Come, now, Belle, you want to go of course, 
 said Mr. Tregonell, turning to his cousin. 
 
 'No, Leonard, that kind of thing is all very well for once in 
 a lifetime. I suppose every woman wants to know what the 
 great world is like — but one season must resemble another, I 
 should think : just like Boscastle Fair, which I used to fancy so 
 lovely when I was a child, till I began to understand that it was 
 exactly the same every year, and that it was just possible for 
 one to outgrow the idea of its delightf ulness.' 
 
 'That isn't true about London though. There is always 
 something new — new clubs, new theatres, new actors, new race- 
 meetings, new horses, new people. I vote for May and June in 
 Bolton Bow.' 
 
 ' I don't think your dear mother's health would be equal to 
 London, this year, Leonard,' said Christabel, gravely. 
 
 She was angry with this beloved and only son for not having 
 seen the change in his mother's appearance — for talking so loudly 
 and so lightly, as if there were nothing to be thought of in lifo 
 expect his own pleasure.
 
 ' Love will have his day.' [45 
 
 •What, old lady, are you under the weather?' he asked, 
 turning to survey his mother with a critical air. 
 
 This was his American manner of inquiring after her health. 
 Mrs. Tregonell, when the meaning of the phrase had been 
 explained to her, confessed herself an invalid, for whom the 
 placid monotony of rural life was much safer than the dissipation 
 of a London season. 
 
 ' Oh, very well/ said Leonard with a shrug ; then you and 
 Belle must stop at home and take care of each other — and I can 
 [ weeks in London en gargon. It won't be worth while 
 to open the house in Bolton Row — I'd rather stop at an hotel.' 
 
 ' i-iit you won't leave me directly after yourVe turn, Leonard?' 
 
 ' No, no, of course not. Not till after Easter. Easter's three 
 weeks ahead of us. You'll be tired enough of me by that time.' 
 
 ' Tired of you ! After three years' absence ? " 
 
 1 Well, you must have got accustomed to doing without me, 
 don't you know,' said Leonard with charming frankness. 
 ' When a man has been three years away he can't hurt his friends' 
 feelings much if he dies abroad. They've learnt how easy it is 
 to get along without him.' 
 
 ' Leonard ! how can you say such cruel things ? ' expostulated 
 his mother, with tears in her eyes. The very mention of death, 
 as among the possibilities of existence, scared her. 
 
 ' There's nothing cruel in it, ma'am ; it's only common sense.' 
 answered Leonard. ' Three years. Well, it's a jolly long time, 
 isn't it ? and I dare say to you, in this sleepy hollow of a place, 
 it seemed precious long. But for fellows who are knocking 
 about the world — as Poker Vandeleur and I were — time spina 
 by pretty fast, I can tell you. I'll hoist in some more sup — 
 another cup of tea, if you please, Miss Bridgeman,' added 
 Leonard, handing in his empty cup. ' It's uncommonly good 
 stuff. Oh ! here's old Randie — come here, Randie.' 
 
 Randie, clutched unceremoniously by the tail, and drawn ovet 
 the earthrug, like any inanimate chattel, remonstrated with a 
 growl and a snap. He had never been ever-fond of the ma3ter 
 of Mount Royal, and absence had not made his heart grow 
 fonder. 
 
 ' His temper hasn't improved,' muttered Leonard, pushing 
 the doe away with his foot. 
 
 ' His temper is always lovely when he's kindly treated,' said 
 Christabel, making room for the dog in her low armchair, where- 
 upon Randie insinuated himself into that soft silken nest, and 
 looht d fondly up at his mistress with his honest brown eyes. 
 
 ' Foil should let me give you a Pomeranian instead of that 
 ungainly beast,' said Leonard. 
 
 ' No, thanks. Never any other dog while Randie lives. 
 H ie is a person, and he and I have a. hundred ideas in
 
 146 Mount Boy dl. 
 
 common. I don't want a toy dog — a dog that is only meant for 
 show.' 
 
 ' Pomeranians are clever enough for anybody, and they are 
 worth looking at. I wouldn't waste my affection upon an ugty 
 dog any more than I would on an ugly woman.' 
 
 ' Eandie is handsome in my eyes,' said Christabel, caressing 
 the sheep-dog's grey muzzle. 
 
 ' I'm through,' said Mr. Tregonell, putting down his cup. 
 
 He affected Yankee phrases, and spoke with a Yankee twang. 
 America and the Americans had suited him, 'down to the 
 ground,' as he called it. Their decisive rapidity, that go-a-head 
 spirit which charged life with a kind of mental electricity — made 
 life ever so much better worth living than in the dull sleepy old 
 world where every one was content with the existing condition 
 of things, and only desired to retain present advantages. 
 Leonard loved sport and adventure, action, variety. He was a 
 tyrant, and yet a democrat. He was quite willing to live on 
 familiar term with grooms and gamekeepers — but not on equal 
 terms. He must always be master. As much good fellowship 
 as they pleased — but they must all knuckle under to him. He 
 had been the noisy young autocrat of the stable-yard and the 
 saddle-room when he was still in Eton jackets. He lived on the 
 easiest terms with the guides and assistants of his American 
 travels, but he took care to make them feel that he was their 
 employer, and, in his own language, ' the biggest boss they were 
 ever likely to have to deal with.' He paid them lavishly, and 
 gave himself the airs of a Prince — Prince Henry in the wild 
 Falstaffian days, before the charge of a kingdom taught him to 
 be grave, yet with but too little of Henry's gallant spirit and 
 generous instincts. 
 
 Three years' travel, in Australia and America, had not 
 exercised a refining influence upon Leonard Tregonell's character 
 or manners. Blind as the mother's love might be, she had 
 insight enough to perceive this, and she acknowledged the fact 
 to herself sadly. There are travellers and travellers : some in 
 whom a wild free life awakens the very spirit of poetry itself— 
 whom unrestrained intercourse with Nature elevates to Nature's 
 grander level — some whose mental power deepens and widens is 
 the solitude of forest or mountain, whose noblest instincts are 
 awakened by loneliness that seems to bring them nearer Goi 
 But Leonard Tregonell was not a traveller of this type. Away 
 from the restraints of civilization — the conventional refinements 
 fcnd smoothings down of a rough character — his nature coarsened 
 and hardened. His love of killing wild and beautiful things 
 grew into a passion. He lived chiefly to hunt and to slay, and 
 had no touch of pity for those gracious creatures which looked at 
 their slaughterer reproachfully, with dim pathetic eyes — wide
 
 * Love will have his day. 1 147 
 
 with a wild surprise at man's cruelty. Constant intercourse with 
 men coarser and more ignorant than himself dragged him down 
 little by little to a lower grade than he had been born to occupy, 
 [n all the time that he had been away he had hardly ever opened 
 a book. Great books had been written. Poets, historians, 
 ) ihilosophers, theologians had given the fruits of their medita- 
 tions and their researches to the world, but never an hour had 
 Mr. Tregonell devoted to the study of human progress, to the 
 onwai-d march of human thought. When he was within reach 
 of newspapers he read them industriously, and learnt from a 
 stray paragraph how some great scientific discovery in science, 
 some brilliant success in art, hail been the talk of the hour ; but 
 neither art nor science interested him. The only papers which 
 he cared about were the sporting papers. 
 
 His travels for the most part had been in wild lonely regions, 
 hut even in the short intervals that he had spent in cities he had 
 shunned all intellectual amusements. He had heard neither 
 concerts nor lectm'es, and had only affected the lowest forms of 
 dramatic art. Most of his nights had been spent in bar-roon.a 
 or groceries, playing faro, monte, poker, euchre, and falling in 
 pleasantly with whatever might be the most popular form of 
 gambling in that particular city. 
 
 And now he had come back to Mount Eoyal, having sown 
 his wild oats, and improved himself mentally and physically, as 
 it was supposed by the outside world, by extensive travel ; and 
 he was henceforward to reign in his father's place, a popular 
 country gentleman, honourable and honoured, useful in his 
 generation, a friend to rich and poor. 
 
 Nobody had any cause for complaint against him during the 
 first few weeks after his return. If his manners were rough and 
 coarse, his language larded with American slang, his conduct was 
 unobjectionable. He was affectionate to his mother, attentive n 
 his free and easy way to Christabel, civil to the old servants, and 
 friendly to old friends. He made considerable alterations in the 
 stables, bought and sold and swopped horses, engaged new under- 
 lings, acted in all out-of-door arrangements as if the place were 
 entirely his own, albeit his mother's life-interest in the estate 
 gave her the custody of everything. But his mother was too full 
 of gladness at his return to object to anything that he did. She 
 opened her purse-strings freely, although his tour had been a 
 costly business. Her income had accumulated in the less ex- 
 
 Eens'ive period of his boyhood, and she could afford to indulge 
 is fancies. 
 He went about with Major Bree, looking up old acquaintances, 
 riding over every acre of the estate — lands which stretche I fai 
 awa • towards Launceston on one side, towards Bodmin on the 
 Other. He held forth largely to the Major on the pettiness and
 
 148 Mntnt Royal. 
 
 narrowness of an English landscape as compared with that vnst 
 continent in which the rivers are as seas and the forests rank 
 and gloomy wildernesses reaching to the trackless and unknown. 
 Sometimes Christabel was their companion in these long rides, 
 mounted on the thoroughbred which Mrs. Tregonell gave her on 
 that last too-happy birthday. The long rides in the sweet soft 
 April air brought health and brightness back to her pale cheeks. 
 She was so anxious to look well and happy for her aunt's sake, 
 to cheer the widow's fading life ; but, oh ! the unutterable sad- 
 ness of that ever-present" thought of the aftertime, that un- 
 answerable question as to what was to become of her own empty 
 days when this dear friend was gone. 
 
 Happy as Leonard seemed at Mount Royal in the society of 
 his mother and his cousin, he did not forego his idea of a month 
 or so in London. He went up to town soon after Easter, took 
 rooms at an hotel near the Hay market, and gave himself up to 
 a round of metropolitan pleasures under the guidance of Captain 
 Vandeleur, who had made the initiation of provincial and inex- 
 perienced youth a kind of profession. He had a neat way of 
 finding out exactly how much money a young man had to dispose 
 of, present or contingent, and put him through it in the quickest 
 possible time and at the pleasantest pace ; but he knew by ex- 
 perience that Leonard had his own ideas about money, and was 
 as keen as experience itself. He would pay the current rate for 
 his pleasures, and no more ; and he had a prudential horror of 
 Jews, post-obits, and all engagements likely to damage his future 
 enjoyment of his estate. He was fond of play, but he did not go 
 in the way of losing large sums — ' ponies' not ' monkies' were his 
 favourite animals — and he did not care about playing against his 
 chosen friend. 
 
 ' I like to have you on my side, Poker,' he said amiably, when 
 the captain proposed a devilled bone and a hand at ecarte after 
 the play. ' You're a good deal too clever for a comfortal le 
 ■antagonist. You play ecarte with your other young friends, 
 Poker, and I'll be your partner at whist.' 
 
 Captain Vandeleur, who by this time was tolerably familiar 
 with the workings of his f need's mind, never again suggested 
 those quiet encounters of skill which must inevitably have 
 resulted to his advantage, had Leonard been weak enough to 
 accept the challenge. To have pressed the question would have 
 been to avow himself a sharper. He had won money from his 
 friend at blind hookey ; but then at blind hookey all men are 
 equal — and Leonard had accepted the decree of fate ; but he was 
 not the kind of man to let another man get the better of him in 
 a series of transactions. He was not brilliant, but he was sl>rewd 
 and keen, and had long ago made up his mind to get fair value 
 for his money. If he allowed Jack Vandeleur to travel at Ma
 
 ' Love will have his day.' 149 
 
 expense, 01 dine and drink daily at his hotel, it was not because 
 Leonard was weakly generous, but because Jack's company was 
 worth the money. He would not have paid for a pint of wine 
 for a man who was dull, or a bore. At Mount Royal, of course, 
 he was obliged now and then to entertain bores. It was an 
 incident in his position as a leading man in the county — but 
 here in London he was free to please himself, and to give the 
 cold shoulder to uncongenial acquaintance. 
 
 Gay as town was, Mr. Tregonell soon tired of it upon this 
 particular occasion. After Epsom and Ascot his enjoyment 
 began to wane. He had made a round of the theatres — he had 
 dined and supped, and played a good many nights at those clubs 
 which he and his friends most affected. He had spent three 
 evenings watching a great billiard match, and he found that his 
 thoughts went back to Mount Royal, and to those he had left 
 there — to Christabel, who had been very kind and sweet to him 
 since his home-coming; who had done much to make heme 
 delightful to him — riding with him, playing and singing to him, 
 playing billiards with him, listening to his stories of travel — 
 interested or seeming interested, in every detail of that wild 
 free life. Leonard did not know that Christabel had done all 
 this for her aunt's sake, in the endeavour to keep the prodigal at 
 home, knowing how the mother's peace and gladness depended 
 on the conduct of her son. 
 
 And now, in the midst of London dissipations, Leonard 
 yearned for that girlish companionship. It was dull enough, no 
 doubt, that calm and domestic life under the old roof-tree ; but 
 it had been pleasant to him, and he had not wearied of it half so 
 quickly as of this fret and fume, and wear and tear of London 
 amusements. Leonard began to think that his natural bent was 
 towards domesticity, and that, as Belle's husband — there could 
 be no doubt that she would accept him when the time came for 
 asking her — he woidd shine as a very estimable character, just 
 as his father had shone before him. He had questioned his 
 mother searchingly as to Belle's engagement to Mr. Angus 
 Hamleigh, and was inclined to be retrospectively jealous, and to 
 hate that unknown rival with a fierce hatred ; nor did he fail to 
 blame his mother for her folly in bringing such a man to Mount 
 Royal. 
 
 ' How could I suppose that Belle would fall in love with 
 him 1 ' asked Mrs. Tregonell, meekly. ' I knew how attached 
 she was to you.' 
 
 ' Attached 1 yes ; but that kind of attachment means so little. 
 She had known me all her life. I was nobody in her estimation 
 — no more than the chairs and tables — and this man was a 
 novelty ; and again, what has a girl to do in such an out-of-the- 
 wai place as this but fall in love with the first comer ; it is
 
 L50 Mount Royal. 
 
 almost the oniy amusement open to her. You ought to have 
 known better than to have invited that fellow here, mother ; 
 you knew Jiat I meant to marry Belle. You ought to have 
 guarded her for me — kept off dangerous rivals. Instead of that 
 you must needs go out of your way to get that fellow here.' 
 
 ' You ought to have come home sooner, Leonard.' 
 
 ' That's nonsense. I was enjoying my life where I was. How 
 could I suppose you would be such a fool 1 ' 
 
 1 Don't say such hard things, Leonard. Think how lonely my 
 life was. The invitation to Mr. Hamleigh was not a new idea ; 
 I had asked him half a dozen times before. I wanted to see 
 him and know him for his father's sake.' 
 
 'His father's sake ! — a man whom you loved better than ever 
 you loved my father, I dare say.' 
 
 ' No, Leonard, that is not true.' 
 
 ' You think not, perhaps, now my father is dead ; but I dare 
 say while he was alive you were always regretting that other 
 mam Nothing exalts a man so much in a woman's mind as 
 his dying. Look at the affection of widows as compared with 
 that of wives.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell strove her hardest to convince her son that 
 his cousin's affections were now free — that it was his business to 
 win her heart ; but Leonard complained that his mother had 
 spoiled his chances— that all the freshness of Christabel's feelings 
 must have been worn off in an engagement that had lasted 
 nearly a year. 
 
 'She'll have me fast enough, I daresay,' he said, with his 
 easy, confident air — that calm masculine consciousness of 
 superiority, as of one who talks of an altogether inferior 
 creature ; ' all the faster, perhaps, on account of having made 
 a fiasco of her first engagement. A girl doesn't like to be pointed 
 at as jilt or jilted. But I shall always feel uncomfortable about 
 this fellow, Hamleigh. I shall never be able quite to believe in 
 my wife.' 
 
 ' Leonard, how can you talk like that, you who know 
 Christabel's high principles.' 
 
 ' Yes, but I wanted to be sure that she had never cared for 
 any one but me ; and you have spoiled my chances of that' 
 
 He stayed little more than a month in London, going back to 
 Mount Royal soon after Ascot, and while the June roses were 
 still in their glory. Brief as his absence had been, even hi* 
 careless eye could see that his mother had changed for the worse 
 since their parting. The hollow cheek had grown hollo wer, the 
 languid eye more languid, the hand that clung so fondly to hia 
 broad, brown palm, was thinner, and more waxen of hue. 
 
 His mother welcomed him with warmest love. 
 
 'My dearest one,' she said, tenderly, 'this is an unexpected
 
 'Love will have his day.' 151 
 
 delight. It is so good of you to come back to me so soon. I 
 want to have you with me, dear, as much as possible — now.' 
 
 ' Why, mother ] ' he asked, kindly, for a dull pain in his 
 breast seemed to answer to these words of hers. 
 
 ' Because I do not think it will be for long. I am very weak, 
 deai". Life seems to be slipping away from me ; but there is no 
 pain, no terror. I feel as if I were being gently carried along a 
 slow gliding stream to some sheltered haven, which I can picture 
 to myself, although I have never seen it. I have only one care, 
 Leonard, one anxiety, and that is for your future happiness. I 
 want your life to be full of joy, dearest, and I want it to be a 
 good life, like your father's.' 
 
 ' Yes, he was a good old buffer, wasn't he 1 ' said Leonard. 
 ' Everybody about here speaks well of him ; but, then, I daresay 
 that's because he had plenty of money, and wasn't afraid to spend 
 it, and was an easy master, and all that sort of thing, don't you 
 know. That's a kind of goodness which isn't very difficult for a 
 man to practise.' 
 
 ' Your father was a Christian, Leonard — a sound, practical, 
 Christian, and he did his duty in every phase of life,' answered 
 the widow, half proudly, half reproachfully. 
 
 ' No doubt. All I say is, that's it's uncommonly easy to be a 
 Christian under such circumstances.' 
 
 ' Your circumstances will be as easy, I trust, Leonard, and 
 your surroundings no less happy, if you win your cousin for 
 your wife. And I feel sure you will win her. Ask her soon, 
 dear — ask her very soon — that I may see you married to her 
 before I die.' 
 
 ' You think she'll say yes, if I do ? I don't want to precipitate 
 matters, and get snubbed for my pains.' 
 
 ' I think she will say yes. She must know how my heart is 
 set upon this marriage. It has been the dream of my life.' 
 
 Despite his self-assurance — his fixed opinion as to his own 
 personal and social value — Leonard Tregonell hesitated a little at 
 asking that question which must certainly be one of the most 
 rolemn inquiries of a man's life. His cousin had been all kind- 
 H. jss and sweetness to him since his return ; yet in his inmost 
 heart he knew that her regard for him was at best of a calm, 
 cousinly quality. He knew this, but he told himself that if she 
 were only willing to accept him as her husband, the rest must 
 follow. It would be his business to see that she was a good wife, 
 and in time she would grow fonder of him, no doubt. He meant 
 to be an indulgent husband. He would be very proud of her 
 beauty, grace, accomplishments. There was no man among his 
 acquaintance who could boast of such a charming wife. She 
 should have her own way in everything : of oourse, so long aa 
 her way did not run counter to his. She would be mistress of
 
 152 Mount Royal. 
 
 one of the finest places in Cornwall, the house in which she had 
 been reared, and which she loved with that foolish affection 
 which cats, women, and other inferior animals feel for familiar 
 habitations. Altogether, as Mr. Tregonell told himself, in his 
 simple and expressive language, she would have a very good 
 time, and it would be hard lines if she were not grateful, and 
 did not take kindly to him. Yet he hesitated considerably before 
 putting the crucial question ; and at last took the leap hurriedly, 
 and not too judiciously, one lovely June morning, when he and 
 Christabel had gone for a long ride alone. They were not in the 
 habit of riding alone, and Major Bree was to have been their 
 companion upon this particular morning, but he had sent at the 
 last moment to excuse himself, on account of a touch of sciatica. 
 They rode early, leaving Mount Royal soon after eight, so as to 
 escape the meridian sun. The world was still fresh and dewy as 
 they rode slowly up the hill, and then down again into the lanes 
 leading towards Camelford ; and there was that exquisite feeling 
 of purity in the atmosphere which wears off as the day grows 
 older. 
 
 ' My mother is looking rather seedy, Belle, don't you think,' 
 he began. 
 
 ' She is looking very ill, Leonard. She has been ill for a long 
 time. God grant we may keep her with us a few years yet, but 
 I am full of fear about her. I go to her room every morning 
 with an aching heart, dreading what the night may have brought. 
 Thank God, you came home when you did. It would have been 
 cruel to stay away longer.' 
 
 1 That's very good in you, Belle — uncommonly good — to talk 
 fbout cruelty, when you must know that it was your faidt I 
 stayed away so long.' 
 
 ' My fault % What had I do do with it ? ' 
 
 ' Everything. I should have been home a year and a half 
 ago — home last Christmas twelvemonth. I had made all my 
 plans with that intention, for I was slightly home-sick in those 
 days — didn't relish the idea of three thousand miles of ever- 
 lasting wet between me and those I loved— and I was coming 
 across the Big Drink as fast as a Cunard could bring me, when 
 I got mother's letter telling me of your engagement. Then I 
 coiled up, and made up my mind to stay in America till I'd done 
 some big licks in the sporting line.' 
 
 'Why should that have influenced you?' Christabel asked, 
 coldly. 
 
 ' Why ? Confound it ! Belle, you know that without asking. 
 You must know that it wouldn't be over-pleasant for me to be 
 living at Mount Royal while you and your lover were spooning 
 about the place. You don't suppose I could quite have stomached 
 thai, do you — to see another man making love to the gir 1 T
 
 *Love will have Jiis day.' 153 
 
 always meant to marry? For you know, Belle, I always did 
 mean it. When you were in pinafores I made up my mind that 
 fou were the future Mrs. Tregonell.' 
 
 ' You did me a great honour,' said Belle, with an icy smile, 
 and I suppose I ought to be very proud to hear it — now. Per- 
 il-"-*, if you had told me your intentions while I w^s in pinafores 
 I might have gx-own up with a due appreciation of your goodness. 
 But you see, as you never said anything about it, my life took 
 another bent.' 
 
 ' Don't chaff, Belle,' exclaimed Leonard. ' I'm in earnest. I 
 was hideously savage when I heard that you had got yourself 
 engaged to a man whom you'd only known a week or two — a 
 man who had led a racketty life in London and Paris ' 
 
 'Stop, cried Christabel, turning upon him with Hashing eye;-, 
 ' I forbid you to speak of him. What right have you to mention 
 his name to me ? I have suffered enough, but that is an im- 
 pertinence I will not endure. If you are going to say another 
 word about him I'll ride back to Mount Royal as fast as my 
 horse can carry me.' 
 
 'And get spilt on the way. Why, what a spitfire you are 
 Belle. I had no idea there was such a spice of the devil in you,' 
 said Leonard, somewhat abashed by this rebuff. Well, I'll hold 
 my tongue about him in future. I'd much rather talk about 
 you and me, and our prospects. What is to become of you, 
 Belle, when the poor mother goes ? You and the doctor have 
 both made up your minds that she's not long for this world. 
 For my own part, I'm not such a croaker, and I've known 
 many a creaking door hanging a precious long time on its 
 binges. Still, it's well to be prepared for the worst. Where is 
 your life to be spent, Belle, when the mater has sent in her 
 checks ? ' 
 
 4 Heaven knows ! ' answered Christabel, tears welling up in 
 her eyes, as she turned her head from the questioner. ' My life 
 will be little worth living when she is gone — but I daresay I 
 shall go on living all the same. Sorrow takes such along tims 
 to kill any one. I suppose Jessie and I will go on the Continent, 
 and travel from place to place, trying to forget the old dear 
 life among new scenes and new people.' 
 
 ' And nicely you will get yourselves talked about, - ' said 
 Leonard, with that unhesitating brutality which his friends 
 called frankness — ' a young and handsome woman without any 
 male relative, wandering about the Continent.' 
 
 ' I shall have Jessie.' 
 
 ' A paid companion — a vast protection she would be to you 
 — about as much as a Pomeranian dog, or a poll parrot.' 
 
 ' Then I can stay in England,' answered Christabel, iudif- 
 fereiitly. ' It will matter very little where J. live.'
 
 154 Mount Boyal. 
 
 'Come, Belle,' said Leonai'd, in a friendly, comfortable tone, 
 laying his broad strong hand on her horse's neck, as they rode 
 slowly side by side up the narrow road, between hedges filled 
 with honeysuckle and eglantine, ' this is flying in the face of 
 Providence, which has made you young and handsome, and an 
 heiress, in order that you might get the most out of life. Is a 
 young woman's life to come to an end all at once because an 
 elderly woman dias ? That's rank nonsense. That's the kind of 
 way widows talk in their first edition of crape and caps. But 
 they don't mean it, my dear ; or, say they think they mean it, 
 they never hold by it. That kind of widow is always a wife 
 again before the second year of her widowhood is over. A.nd 
 to hear you — not quite one-and-twenty, and as fit as a fid — in 
 the very zenith of your beauty,' said Leonard, hastily correcting 
 the horsey turn of his compliment, — 'to hear you talk in that 
 despairing way is too provoking. Came, Belle, be rational. Why 
 should you go wandering about Switzerland and Italy with 
 a shrewish little old maid like Jessie Bridgeman — when — 
 when you can stay at Mount Royal and be its mistress. I 
 always meant, you to be my wife, Belle, and I still mean it — in 
 spite of bygones.' 
 
 You are very good — very forgiving,' said Christabel, with 
 most irritating placidity, ' but unfortunately I never meant to 
 be your wife then — and I don't mean it now.' 
 
 ' In plain words, you reject me 1 ' 
 
 ' If you intend this for an offer, most decidedly,' answered 
 Christabel, as firm as a rock. ' Come, Leonard, don't look so 
 angry ; let us be friends and cousins — almost brother and sister 
 — as we have been in all the years that are gone. Let us unite 
 in the endeavour to make your dear mother's life happy — so 
 happy, that she may grow strong and well again — restored by 
 perfect freedom from care. If you and I were to quarrel she 
 would be miserable. We must be good friends always — if it 
 were only for her sake.' 
 
 ' That's all very well, Christabel, but a man's feelings are 
 not so entirely within his control as you seem to suppose. Do 
 you think I shall ever forget how you threw me over for a 
 fellow you had only known a week or so — and now, when I tell 
 you how, from my boyhood, I have relied upon your being my 
 wife — always kept you in my mind as the one only woman 
 who was to bear my name, and sit at the head of my table, 
 you coolly inform me that it can never be 1 You would 
 rather go wandering about the world with a hired com- 
 panion ' 
 
 ' Jessie is not a hired companion — she is my very deal 
 friend.' 
 
 ' Y' u choose to call her so — but she came to Mount Boyal
 
 • But here is One who Loves you as of Old.' 155 
 
 in answer to an advertisement, and my mother pays her wages, 
 just like the housemaids. You would rather roam about with 
 Jessie Bridgeman, getting yourself talked about at every table 
 d'hote in Europe — a prey for every Captain Deuceace, or 
 Loosetish, on the Continent — than you would be my wife, and 
 mistress of Mount Royal.' 
 
 1 Because nearly a year ago I made up my mind never to be 
 any man's wife, Leonard,' answered Christabel, gravely. ' I 
 should hate myself if I were to depart from that resolve.' 
 
 1 You mean that when you broke with Mr. Ilamleigh you 
 did not think there was any one in the world good enough to 
 stand in his shoes,' said Leonard, savagely. ' And for the sake 
 of a man who turned out so badly that you were obliged to chuck 
 him up, you refuse a fellow who has loved you all his life.' 
 
 Christabel turned her horse's head, and went homewards at 
 a sharp trot, leaving Leonard, discomfited, in the middle of the 
 lane. He had nothing to do but to trot meekly after her, afraid 
 to go too fast, lest he should urge her horse to a bolt, and 
 managing at last to overtake her at the bottom of a hill. 
 
 ' Do hud some grass somewhere, so that we may get a canter,' 
 Bhe said ; and her cousin knew that there was to be no more 
 conversation that morning. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 •but here is one who loves you as of old.' 
 
 After this Leonard sulked, and the aspect of home life at 
 Mount Royal became cloudy and troubled. He was not abso- 
 lutely uncivil to his cousin, but he was deeply resentful, and he 
 showed his resentment in various petty ways — descending so 
 low as to give an occasional sly kick to Randie. He was grumpy 
 in his intercourse with his mother ; he took every opportunity 
 of being rude to Miss Bridgeman ; he sneered at all their 
 womanly occupations, their charities, their church-going. That 
 domestic sunshine which had so gladdened the widow's heart, 
 was gone for ever, as it seemed. Her son now snatched at every 
 occasion for getting away from home. He dined at Bodmin one 
 night — at Launceston, another. He had friends to meet at 
 Plymouth, and dined and slept at the ' Duke of Cornwall.' He 
 came home bringing worse devils — in the way of ill-temper and 
 rudeness — than those which he had taken away with him. I le m 
 longer pretended the faintest interest in Christabel's playing — 
 confessing frankly that all classical compositions, especially those 
 of Beethoven, suggested to him that fax-famed melody which was
 
 I5t> Mount Royal. 
 
 fatal to the traditional cow. He no longer offered to make her 
 a fine billiard player. 'No woman ever could play billiards,' 
 he said, contemptuously 'they have neither eye nor wrist; 
 they know nothing about strengths ; and always handle their 
 cue as if it was Moses's rod, and was going to turn into a snake 
 and bite 'em.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell was not slow to guess the cause of her son's 
 changed humour. She was too intensely anxious for the fulfil- 
 ment of this chief desire of her soul not to be painfully conscious 
 of failure. She had urged Leonard to speak soon — and he Lad 
 spoken — with disastrous result. She had seen the angry cloud 
 upon her son's brow when he came home from that tete-a-tete 
 ride with Christabel. She feared to question him, for it waa 
 her rash counsel, perhaps, which had brought this evil result to 
 pass. Yet she could not hold her peace for ever. So one 
 evening, when Jessie and Christabel were dining at Trevalga 
 Ite-tory, and Mrs. Tregonell was enjoying the sole privilege of 
 her son's company, she ventured to approach the subject. 
 
 4 How altered you have been lately' — lately, meaning for at 
 /east a month — 'in your manner to your cousin, Leonard,' she 
 said, witli a feeble attempt to speak lightly, her voice tremulous 
 with suppressed emotion. ' Has she offended you in any way 1 
 You and she used to be so very sweet to each other.' 
 
 ' Yes, she was all honey when I first came home, wasn't she, 
 mother 1 ' returned Leonard, nursing his boot, and frowning at 
 the lamp on the low table by Mrs. Tregonell's chair. ' All hypo- 
 crisy—rank humbug— that's what it was. She is still bewailing 
 that fellow whom you brought here— and, mark my words, she'll 
 marry him sooner or later. She threw him over in a fit of 
 temper, and pride, and jealousy ; and when she finds she can't 
 live without him she'll take some means of bringing him back to 
 her. It was all your doing mother. You spoiled my chances 
 when you brought your old sweetheart's son into this house. I 
 don't think you could have had much respect for my dead father 
 when you invited that man to Mount Royal.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell's mild look of reproach might have touched 
 the hardest heart ; but it was lost on Leonard, who sat scowling 
 at the lamp, and did not once meet his mother's eyes. 
 
 ' It is not kind of you to say that Leonard,' she said, geutly ; 
 ' you ought to know that I was a true and loving wife to your 
 father, and that I have always honoured his memory, as a true 
 wife should He knew that I was interested in Angus 
 Hamleigh's career, and he never resented that feeling. I am 
 sorry your cousin has rejected you— more sorry than even you 
 yourself can be, I believe, for your marriage has been the 
 dream of my life. But we cannot control fate. Are you really 
 fond vi her, deal 1
 
 • But here is One ivho Loves you as of Old.' 157 
 
 Fond of her ? A great deal too fond — foolishly — igno- 
 miniously fond of her — so fond that I am beginning to detest 
 her.' 
 
 ' Don't despair then, Leonard. Let this first refusal count 
 for nothing. Only be patient, and gentle with her — not cold and 
 rude, as you have been lately.' 
 
 ' It's easy to talk,' said Leonard, contemptuously, ' But do 
 vou suppose I can feel very kindly towards a girl who refused 
 rue as coolly as if I had been asking her to dance, and who let 
 me see at the same time that she is still passionately in love 
 with Angus Hamleigh. You should have seen how she blazed 
 cut at me when I mentioned his name — her eyes flaming — her 
 cheeks first crimson and then deadly pale. That's what love 
 means. And, even if she were willing to be my wife to-morrow, 
 she would never give me such love as that. Curse her,' 
 muttered the lover between his clenched teeth ; ' I didn't know 
 how fond I was of her till she refused me ; and now, I could 
 crawl at her feet, and sue to her as a palavering Irish beggar 
 sues for alms, cringing and fawning, and flattering and lying — 
 and yet in my heart of hearts I should be savage with her all the 
 time, knowing that she will never care for me as she cared for 
 that other fellow.' 
 
 ' Leonard, if you knew how it pains me to hear you talk like 
 that,' said Mrs. Tregonell. ' It makes me fearful of your 
 impetuous, self-willed nature.' 
 
 'Self-will be ! somethinged ! ' growled Leonard. ' Did 
 
 vou ever know a man who cultivated anybody else's will j 
 Would you have me pretend to be better than 1 am — tell you 
 that I can feel all affection for the girl who preferred the. first 
 stranger who came in her way to the playfellow and companion 
 of her childhood I ' 
 
 ' If you had been a little less tormenting, a little less exacting 
 with her in those days, Leonard, I think she would have remem- 
 bered you more tenderly,' said Mrs. Tregonell. 
 
 ' If you are going to lecture me about what I was as a boy 
 we'd better cut the conversation,' retorted Leonard. ' I'll go and 
 practice the spot-stroke for half an hour, while you take your 
 after-dinner nap.' 
 
 ' Xo, dear, don't go away. I don't feel in the least inclined 
 for sleep. I had no idea of lecturing you, Leonard, believe me ; 
 only I cannot help regretting, as you do, that Christabel should 
 not be more attached to you. But I feel very sure that, if you 
 are patient, she will come to think differently bv-and-by.' 
 
 ' Didn't you tell me to ask her — and quickly I ' 
 
 ' Yes, that was because I was impatient. Life seemed 
 •flipping away from me — and I. was so eager to be secure of my 
 deaj- b(!y : « happiness Let us try different tactics, Leo. Take
 
 158 Mount Boyav. 
 
 things quietly for a little — behave to your cousin just as if there 
 had been nothing of this kind between you, and who knows* 
 what may happen.' 
 
 ' I know of one thing that may and will happen next 
 October, unless the lady changes her tune,' answered Leonard, 
 sidkily. 
 
 ' What is that 1 ' 
 
 ' I shall go to South America — do a little mountaineering in 
 the Equatorial Andes — enjoy a little life in Valparaiso, Truxillo 
 — Lord knows where ! I've done North America, from Canada 
 to Frisco, and now I shall do the South.' 
 
 ' Leonard, you would not be so cruel as to leave me to die in 
 my loneliness ; for 1 think, dear, you must know that I have 
 oot long to live.' 
 
 ' Come, mother, I believe you fancy yourself ever so much 
 worse than you really are. This jog-trot, monotonous life of 
 yours would breed vapours in the liveliest person. Besides, if 
 you should be ill while I am away, you'll have your niece, whom 
 you love as a daughter — and perhaps your niece's husband, this 
 danr Angus of yours — to take care of you.' 
 
 ' You are very hard upon me, Leonard — and yet, I went 
 against my conscience for your sake. I let Christabel break 
 with her lover. I said never one word in his favour, although 
 I must have known in my heart that they would both be 
 miserable. I had your interest at heart more than theirs — I 
 thought, " here is a chance for my boy." ' 
 
 ' You were very considerate — a day after the fair. Don't 
 you think it would have been better to be wise befoi-e the event, 
 and not to have invited that coxcomb to Mount Royal V 
 
 He came again and again to the charge, always with fresh 
 bitterness. He could not forgive his mother for this involuntary 
 wrong which she had done to him. 
 
 After this he went oft' to the solitude of the billiard-room, 
 and a leisurely series of experiments upon the spot-stroke. It 
 was his only idta of a contemplative evening. 
 
 He was no less sullen and gloomy in his manner to Christabel 
 next morning at breakfast, for all his mother had said to him 
 overnight. He answered his cousin in monosyllables, and was 
 rude to Randie — wondered that his mother should allow doers in 
 her dining-room — albeit Randie's manners were far superior to 
 his own. 
 
 Later in the morning, when Christabel and her aunt were 
 alone, the girl crept to her favourite place beside Mrs. Tregonell's 
 chair, and with her folded arms resting on the cushioned elbenr, 
 looked up lovingly at the widow's grave, sad face. 
 
 ' Auntie, dearest, you know so well how fondly I love you, 
 that I am sure you won't tlii«k me any less loving and true, if I
 
 ' But here is One wlw Loves you as of Old.* 359 
 
 ^ yon to let me leave you for a little while. Let me go away 
 somewhere with Jessie, to some quiet German town, where I 
 can improve myself in music, and where she and 1 can lead a 
 bard-working, studious life, just like a couple of Girton girls. 
 You remember, last year you suggested that we should travel, 
 and I refused your offer, thinking that I should be happier at 
 home ; but now I feel the need of a change.' 
 
 1 And you would leave me, now that my health is broken, 
 and that I am so dependent on your love V said Mrs. Tregonell, 
 with mild reproachfulness. 
 
 Christabel bent down to kiss the thin, white hand that lay 
 on the cushion near her — anxious to hide the tears that sprang 
 quickly to her eyes. 
 
 ' You have Leonard,' she faltered. ' You are happy, are you 
 not, dearest, now Leonard is at home again.' 
 
 'At home — yes, I thank God that my son is under my roof 
 once more. But how long may he stay at home? How much 
 do I have of his company — in and out all day — anywhere but at 
 my side — making every possible excuse for leaving me ? He 
 has begun, already, to talk of going to South America in the 
 autumn. Poor boy, he is restless and unhappy ; and I know the 
 reason. You must know it too, Belle. It is your fault. You 
 liave spoiled the dream of my life.' 
 
 ' Auntie, is this generous, is this fair ? ' pleaded Christabel, 
 with her head sti«4 bent over the pale wasted hand. 
 
 1 It is natural at least,' answered the widow, impetuously. 
 ' Why cannot you care for my boy, why cannot you understand 
 and value his devotion ? It is not an idle fancy — born of a few 
 weeks' acquaintance — not the last new caprice of a battered roue, 
 who offers his worn-out heart to you when other w r omen have done 
 with it. Leonard's is the love of long years — the love of a fresh 
 unspoiled nature. I know that he has not Angus Hamleigh's 
 refinement of manner — he is not so clever — so imaginative — but 
 of what value is such surface refinement when the man's inner 
 nature is coarse and profligate. A man who has lived among 
 impure women must have become coarse ; there must be deteri- 
 oration, ruin, for a man's nature in such a life as that,' continued 
 Mrs. Tregonell, passionately, her resentment against Angus 
 Hamleigh kindling as she thought how he had ousted her son. 
 'Why should you not value my boy's love?' she asked again. 
 'What is there wanting in him that you should treat him so 
 contemptuously 1 He is young, handsome, brave — owner of this 
 place of which you are so fond. Your marriage with him would 
 bring the Champernowne estate together again. Everybody 
 was sorry to see it divided. It would bring together two of the 
 t and best names in the county. You might call your 
 eldest son Champernowne Tregonell.'
 
 160 Mount Royal. 
 
 'Don't, Auntie, don't go on like that,' entreated Christabel, 
 piteously : if you only knew how little such arguments influence 
 me : ' the glories of our rank and state are shadows, not substan- 
 tial things.' What difierence do names and lands make in the 
 happiness of a life ? If Angus Hamleigh had been a ploughman's 
 son, like Burns — nameless — penniless — only just himself, I 
 should have loved him exactly the same. Dearest, these are the 
 things in which we cannot be governed by other people's wisdom. 
 Our hearts choose for us ; in spite of ua. I have been obliged to 
 think seriously of life since Leonard and I had that unlucky con- 
 versation the other day. He told you about it, perhaps ?' 
 ' He told me that you refused him.' 
 
 ' As I would have refused any other man, Auntie. I have 
 made up my mind to live and die unmarried. It is the only 
 tribute I can offer to one I loved so well.' 
 
 'And who proved so unworthy of your love,' said Mrs. 
 Tregonell, moodily. 
 
 ' Do not speak of him, if you cannot speak kindly. You once 
 loved his father, but you seem to have forgotten that. Let me 
 go away for a little while, Auntie — a few months only, if you 
 like. My presence in this house only does harm. Leonard is 
 angry with me — and you are angry for his sake. We are all 
 unhappy now — nobody talks freely — or laughs — or takes life 
 pleasantly. We all feel constrained and miserable. Let me go, 
 dear. When I am gone you and Leonard can be happy 
 together.' 
 
 ' No, Belle, we cannot. You have spoiled his life. You 
 have broken his heart.' 
 
 Christabel smiled a little contemptuously at the mother's 
 wailing. ' Hearts are not so easily broken,' she said, ' Leonard's 
 least of all. He is angry because for the first time in his life 
 he finds himself thwarted. He wants to marry me, and I don't 
 want to marry him. Do you remember how angry he was when 
 he wanted to go out shooting, at eleven years of age, and you 
 refused him a gun. He moped and fretted for a week, and 
 \i>u were quite as unhappy as he was. It is almost the first 
 tiling I remember about him. When he found you were quite 
 Brm in your refusal, he left off sulking, and reconciled him- 
 self to the inevitable. He will do just the same about this 
 refusal of mine — when I am out of his sight. But my pre- 
 sence here irritates him.' 
 
 'Christabel, if you leave me I shall know that you have 
 never loved me,' said Mrs. Tregonell, with sudden vehemence.' 
 ' You must know that I am dying — very slowly, perhaps — 
 a wearisome decay for these who can only watch and wait, 
 and bear with me till I am dead. But I know and feel 
 that I am dying. This trouble wil\ hasten rny end, and
 
 'But here is One who Loves you as of Old.' 161 
 
 instead of dying in peace, with the assurance of my boy's 
 happy future — with the knowledge that he will have a virtuous 
 and loving wife, a wife of my own training, to guide him 
 and influence him for good — I shall die miserable, fearing 
 that he may fall into evil hands, and that evil days may 
 come upon him. I know how impetuous, how impulsive he 
 is ; how easily governed through his feelings, how little able 
 to rule himself by hard common-sense. And you, who have 
 known him all your life — who know the best and worst of him 
 — you can be so indifferent to his happiness, Christabel. How 
 can I believe, in the face of this, that you ever loved me, hig 
 mother ? 
 
 1 1 have loved you as my mother,' replied the girl, with her 
 arms round her aunt's neck, her lips pressed against that pale 
 thin cheek. ' I love you better than any one in this world. If 
 God would spare you for years to come, and we could live 
 always together, and be all and all to each other as we have 
 been, I think I could be quite happy. Yes, I could feel as if 
 there were nothing wanting in this life. But I cannot marry a 
 man I do not love, whom I never can love.' 
 
 'He would take you on trust, Belle,' murmured the mother, 
 imploringly ; ' he would be content with duty and good faith. 
 I know how true and loyal you are, dearest, and that you would 
 be a perfect wife. Love would come afterwards.' 
 
 ' Will it make you happier if I don't go away, Auntie 1 ' 
 asked Christabel, gently. 
 ' Much happier.' 
 
 ' Then I will stay ; and Leonard may be as rude to me as he 
 likes : he may do anything disagreeable, except kick Randie ; 
 and I will not murmur. But you and I must never talk of 
 him as we have talked to-day : it can do no good.' 
 
 After this came much kissing and hugging, and a few tears ; 
 and it was agreed that Christabel should forego her idea of six 
 months' study of classical music at the famous conservatoire at 
 Leipsic. 
 
 She and Jessie had made all their plans before she spoke to 
 her aunt ; and when she informed Miss Bridgeman that she 
 had given way to Mrs. Tregonell's wish, and had abandoned all 
 idea of Germany, that strong-minded young woman expressed 
 herself most unreservedly. 
 
 ' You are a tool ! ' she exclaimed. ' No doubt that's an 
 outrageous remark from a person in my position to an heiress 
 like you ; but I can't help it. You are a fool- a yielding, self- 
 abnegating fool ! If you stay here you will marry that man. 
 There is no escape possible for you. Your aunt has made up her 
 mind about it. She will worry you till you give your consent, 
 ind then ycu will be miserable ever afterwards.' 
 
 M
 
 162 Mount Royal, 
 
 ' 1 shall do nothing of the kind. I wonder that you can 
 think me so weak.' 
 
 ' If you are weak enough to stay, you will be weak enough 
 to do the other thing,' retorted Jessie. 
 
 ' How can I go when my aunt looks at me with those sad 
 eyes, dying eyes— they are so changed since last year— and 
 implores me to stop 1 I thought you loved her, Jessie 1 ' 
 
 'I do love her, with a fond and grateful affection. She was 
 my first friend outside my own hume ; she is my benefactress. 
 But I have to think of your welfare, Christabel— your welfare 
 ju this world and the world to come. Both will be in danger 
 if you stay here and marry Leonard Tregonell.' 
 
 ' I am going to stay here ; and I am not going to marry 
 Leonard. Will that assurance satisfy you? One would think 
 I had no will of my own.' 
 
 ' Yon have not the will to withstand your aunt. She parted 
 you and Mr. Hamleigh ; and she will marry you to her son.' 
 
 ' The parting was my act, ' said Christabel. 
 
 ' It was your aunt who brought it about. Had she been 
 true and loyal there would have been no such parting. If you 
 had only trusted to me in that crisis, I think I might have 
 saved you some sorrow ; but what's done cannot be undone.' 
 
 ' There are some cases in which a woman must judge for 
 herself,' Christabel replied, coldly. 
 
 'A woman, yes — a woman who has had some experience of 
 life ; but not a girl, who knows nothing of the hard real 
 world and its temptations, difficulties, struggles. Don't let us 
 talk of it any more. I cannot trust myself to speak when I 
 remember how shamefully he was treated.' 
 
 Christabel stared in amazement. The calm, practical Miss 
 Bridgeman spoke with a passionate vehemence which took the 
 girl's breath away; and yet, in her heart of h earts, Christabel 
 was grateful to her for this sudden flash of anger. 
 
 ' I did not know you liked him so much — that you were so 
 sorry for him,' she faltered. 
 
 ' Then you ought to have known, if you ever took the trouble 
 
 to remember how good he always was to me, how sympathetic, 
 
 how tolerant of my company when it was forced upon him day 
 
 After day, how seemingly unconscious of my plainness and dow- 
 
 •iiness. Why there was net a present he gave me which did not 
 
 show the most thoughtful study of my tastes and fancies. I 
 
 never look at one of his gifts— I was not obliged to fling Iris 
 
 offerings back in his face as you were— without wondering that 
 
 a line gentleman could be so full of small charities and delicate 
 
 courtesy. He was like one of those wits and courtiers one reads 
 
 of in Burnet— not spotless, like Tennyson's Arthur— but the very 
 
 issence of refinement and good feeling. God bless him ! Where- 
 ver ] lQ j g> >
 
 l But here is One who Loves you as of Old.' 163 
 
 'You are very odd sometimes, Jessie,' said Christabel, kissing 
 her friend, 'but you have a noble heart.' 
 
 There was a marked change in Leonard's conduct when he 
 and his cousin met in the drawing-room before dinner. He had 
 been absent at luncheon, on a trout-fishing expedition ; but 
 there had been time since his return for a long conversation 
 between him and his mother. She had told him how his sullen 
 temper had almost driven Christabel from the house, and how 
 she had been only induced to stay by an appeal to her affection. 
 This evening he was all amiability, and tried to make his peace 
 with Randie, who received his caresses with a stolid forbearance 
 rather than with gratification. It was easier to make friends 
 with Christabel than with the dcg, for she wished to be kind to 
 her cousin on his mother's account. 
 
 That evening the reign of domestic peace seemed to btf 
 renewed. There were no thunder-clouds in the atmosphere 
 Leonard strolled about the lawn with his mother and Christabel, 
 ing at the roses, and planning where a few more choice trees 
 might yet be added to the collection. Mrs. Tregonell's walks 
 now rarely went beyond this broad velvet lawn, or the shrubberies 
 that bordered it. She drove to church on Sundays, but she had 
 left off visiting that involved long drives, though she professed 
 herself delighted to see her friends. She did not want the house 
 to become dull and gloomy for Leonard. She even insisted that 
 there should be a garden party on Christabel's twenty-first birth- 
 day ; and she was delighted when some of the old friends who 
 came to Mount Royal that day insinuated their congratulations, 
 in a tentative manner, upon Miss Courtenay's impending engage- 
 ment to her cousin. 
 
 ' There is nothing definitely settled,' she told Mrs. St. Aubyn, 
 'but I have every hope that it will be so. Leonard adores her ' 
 
 ' And it would be a much more suitable match for her than 
 the other,' said Mrs. St. Aubyn, a commonplace matron of irre- 
 proachable lineage : ' it would be so nice for you to have her 
 settled near you. "Would they live at Mount Royal 1 ? ' 
 
 ' Of course. Where else should my son live but in his father's 
 house ] ' 
 
 1 But it is your house.' 
 
 ' Do you think I should allow my life-interest in the place to 
 ' ind in the way of Leonard's enjoyment of it?' -yclaimed Mrs. 
 Tregonell. ' I should be proud to take the second place in his 
 house — proud to see his young wife at the head of his table.' 
 
 'That i.-; all very well in theory, but I have never seen it 
 work out well in fact,' said the Rector of Trcvalga, who made a 
 third in the little g roup seated on the edge of the wide lawn, 
 where sportive youth was playing tennis, in half a dozen courts, 
 to the enlivening strains of a military band from Bodrnrn
 
 164 Blount Eoyal. 
 
 ' How thoroughly happy Christabel looks,' observed another 
 friendlj matron to Mrs. Tregonell, a little later in the afternoon : 
 ' she seems to have quite got over her trouble about Mr 
 Hamleigh.' 
 
 'Yes, I hope that is forgotten,' answered Mrs. Tregonell 
 
 This garden party was an occasion of unspeakable pain to 
 Christabel. Her aunt had insisted upon sending out the in- 
 vitations. There must be some kind of festival upon her 
 adopted daughter's coming of age. The inheritor of lands and 
 money was a person whose twenty-first birthday could not be 
 permitted to slip by unmarked, like any other day in the 
 calendar. 
 
 " If we were to have no garden party this summer people 
 would say you were broken-hearted at the sad end of last year's 
 engagement, darling,' said Mrs. Tregonell, when Christabel had 
 pleaded against the contemplated assembly, 'and I know your 
 pride would revolt at that.' 
 
 ' Dear Auntie, my pride has been levelled to the dust, if I 
 ever had any ; it will not raise its head on account of a garden 
 party.' 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell insisted, albeit even her small share of the 
 preparations, the mere revision of the list of guests — the dis- 
 cussion and acceptance of Jessie Bridgeman's an'angements— 
 was a fatigue to the jaded mind and enfeebled body. When 
 the day came the mistress of Mount Boyal carried herself with 
 the old air of quiet dignity which her friends knew so well. 
 People saw that she was aged, that she had grown pale and thin 
 and wan ; and they ascribed this change in her to anxiety about 
 her niece's engagement. There were vague ideas as to the 
 cause of Mr. Hamleigh's dismissal — dim notions of terrible 
 iniquities, startling revelations, occurring on the very brink of 
 marriage. That section of county society which did not go to 
 London knew a great deal more about the details of the story 
 than the people who had been in town at the time and had seen 
 Miss Courtenay and her lover almost daily. For those daughters 
 of the soil who but rarely crossed the Tamar the story of Miss 
 Courtenay's engagement was a social mystery of so dark a com- 
 plexion that it afforded inexhaustible material for tea-table 
 gossip. A story, of which no one seemed to know the exact 
 details, gave wide ground for speculation, and could always be 
 looked at from new points of view. 
 
 ' And now here was the same Miss Courtenay smiling upon 
 her friends, fair and radiant, showing no traces of last year's 
 tragedy in her looks or manners; being, indeed, one of those 
 women who do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves fcr daws 
 to peek at. The local mind, therefore, arrived at the conclusion 
 that Miss Courtenay had consoled herself for the loss of one
 
 *But here is One who Tioves you as of Old.' 165 
 
 lover by the gain of another, and was now engaged to her 
 cousin. 
 
 Clara St. Aubyn ventured to congratulate her upon this 
 happy issue out of bygone griefs. 
 
 ' I am so glad,' she said, squeezing Christabel's hand, during 
 an inspection of the hot-houses. ' I like him so much.' 
 
 ' I don't quite understand,' replied Christabel, with a freezing 
 look : ' who is it whom you like ? The new Curate ? ' 
 
 ' No, deal', don't pretend to misunderstand me. I am so 
 pleased to think that you and your cousin are going to make a 
 match of it. He is so handsome — such a fine, frank, open- 
 hearted maimer — so altogether nice.' 
 
 ' I am pleased to hear you praise hhn, ! said Christabel, still 
 supremely cold ; ' but my cousin is my cousin, and will never 
 be anything more.' 
 
 ' You don't mean that V 
 
 ' I do — without the smallest reservation.' 
 
 Clara became thoughtful. Leonard Tregonell was one of the 
 best matches in the county, and he had always been civil to 
 her. They had tastes in common, were both horsey and doggy, 
 and plain-spoken to brusqueness. Why should not she be 
 mistress of Mount Eoyal, by-and-bye, if Christabel despised hei 
 opportunities ? 
 
 At half -past seven, the last carriage had driven away from 
 the porch ; and Mrs. Tregonell, thoroughly exhausted by the 
 exertions of the afternoon, reclined languidly in her favourite 
 chair, moved from its winter-place by the hearth, to a deep 
 embayed window looking on to the rose-garden. Christabel sat 
 on a stool at her aunt's feet, her fair head resting against the 
 cushioned elbow of Mrs. TregonelTs chair. 
 
 'Well, Auntie, the people are gone and the birthday is over. 
 Isn't that a blessing ? ' she said, lightly. 
 
 ' Yes, dear, it is over, and you are of age — your own mistress 
 My guardianship expires to-day. I wonder whether I shall find 
 any difference in my darling now she is out of leading-strings.' 
 
 ' I don't think you will, Auntie. I have not much inclina- 
 tion for desperate flights of any kind. What can freedom or 
 the unrestricted use of my fortune give me, which your indulge 
 ence has not already given? What whim or fancy of mine have 
 you ever thwarted ? No, aunt Di, I don't think there is any 
 scope for rebellion on my part.' 
 
 ' And you will not leave me, dear, till the end V pleaded tfio 
 widow. ' Your bondage cannot be for very long.' 
 
 ' Auntie ! how can you speak like that, when you know — 
 when you must know that I have no one in the world but you 
 now — no one, dearest,' said Christabel, on her knees at her aunt's 
 feet, clasping and kissing the pale transparent hands. ' I have
 
 166 Mount Royal. 
 
 not the knack of loving many people. Jessie is very good to me, 
 and I am fond of her as my friend and companion. Uncle 
 Oliver is all goodness, and I am fond of him in just the same 
 way. But I never loved any one but you and Angus. Angus is 
 gone from me, and if God takes you, Auntie, my prayer is that I 
 may speedily follow you.' 
 
 ' My love, that is a blasphemous prayer : it implies doubt in 
 God's goodness. lie means the young and innocent to be happy 
 in this world — happy and a source of happiness to others. You 
 will form new ties ; a husband and children will console you for 
 all you have lost in the past.' 
 
 ' No, aunt, I shall never marry. Put that idea out of your 
 mind. You will think less badly of me for refusing Leonard if 
 you understand that I have made up my mind to live and die 
 unmarried.' 
 
 ' But I cannot and will not believe that, Belle : whatever you 
 may think now, a year hence your ideas will have entirely 
 altered. Remember my own history. When George Hamleigh 
 died I thought the world — so far as it concerned me — had come 
 to an end, that I had only to wait for death. My fondest hope 
 was that I should die within the year, and be buried in a grave 
 near his — yet five years afterwards I was a happy wife and 
 mother.' 
 
 1 Cod was good to you,' said Christabel, quietly, thinking all 
 the while that her aunt must have been made of a different clay 
 from herself. There was a degradation in being able to forget : 
 it implied a lower kind of organism than that finely strung nature 
 v% inch loves once and once only. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 ' THAT LIP AND VOICE ARE MUTE FOR EVER.' 
 
 Having pledged herself to remain with her aunt to the end, 
 Christabel was fain to make the best of her life at Mount Royal, 
 and iii order to do this she must needs keep on good terms with 
 her cousin. Leonard's conduct of late had been irreproachable : 
 he was attentive to his mother, all amiability to Christabel, and 
 almost civil to Miss Bridgeman. He contrived to make his peace 
 with Randie, and he made such a good impressi#n upon Major 
 Bree that he won the warm praises of that gentleman. 
 
 The cross country rides were resumed, the Major always in 
 attendance ; and Leonard and his cousin were seen so often 
 together, riding, driving, or walking, that the idea of an engage- 
 ment between them became a fixture in the local mind, which
 
 1 That Lip and Voice are Mute for Ever.' 167 
 
 held that when one was off with the old love it was well to be on 
 with the new. 
 
 And so the summer ripened and waned. Mrs. Tregoi. 
 health seemed to improve in the calm happiness of a domeotic 
 life in which there was no indication of disunion. She had never 
 surrendered her hope of Christabel's relenting. Leonard's frank 
 and generous character — his good looks — his local popularity — 
 ■must ultimately prevail over the memory of another — that other 
 having so completely given up his chances. Mrs. Tregonell was 
 half inclined to recognize the nobleness of that renunciation ; 
 half disposed to accept it as a proof that Angus Hamleigh'a 
 heart still hankered after the actress who had been his iirst 
 infatuation. In either case no one could doubt that it was well 
 for Christabel to be released from such an engagement. To wed 
 Angus would have been to tie herself to sickness and death — ts 
 take upon herself the burden of early widowhood, to put on sack- 
 cloth and ashes as a wedding garment. 
 
 It was winter, and there were patches of snow upon the hills, 
 and sea and sky were of one chill slatey hue, before Leonard 
 ventured to repeat that question which he had asked with such 
 ill effect in the sweet summer morning, between hedgerows 
 flushed with roses. But through all the changes of the waning 
 year there had been one purpose in his mind, and every acfe of 
 his life had tended to one result. He had sworn to himself that 
 his cousin shoidd be Ids wife. Whatever barriers of disinclina- 
 tion, direct antagonism even, there might be on her side must be 
 broken down by dogged patience, unyielding determination on 
 his side. He had the spirit of the hunter, to whom that prey is 
 most precious which costs the longest chase. He loved his cousin 
 more passionately to-day, after keeping his feelings in check for 
 six months, than he had loved her when he asked her to be his 
 wife. Every day of delay had increased his ardour and strength- 
 ened his resolve. 
 
 It was New Year's day. Christabel and Miss Bridgeman 
 had been to church in the morning, and had taken a long walk 
 •rith Leonard, who contrived to waylay them at the church door 
 ifter church. Then had come a rather late luncheon, after which 
 Christabel spent an hour in her aunt's room reading to her, and 
 talking a little in a subdued way. It was one of Mrs. Tregonell's 
 bad days, a day upon which she could hardly leave her sofa, and 
 Christabel came away from the invalid's room full of sadness. 
 
 She was sitting by the fire in the library, alone in the dusk, 
 save for Randie's company, when her cousin came in and found 
 
 her. i o t i 
 
 ' Why, Belle, what are you doing all alone in the dark If ue 
 
 exclaimed. 'I almost thought the room vraa^empty.' 
 • I have been thinking,' she said, with a sigh.
 
 1G8 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' Your thoughts could not have been over-pleasant, I should 
 ihink, by that sigh,' said Leonard, ;oming over to the hearth 
 and drawing the logs together. ' TI jre'a a cheerful blaze for you 
 Don't give way to sad thoughts on the first day of the yeai 
 Belle : it's a bad beginning.' 
 
 ' I have been thinking of your dear mother, Leonard : my 
 mother, for she has been more to me than one mother in a 
 hundred is to her daughter. She is with us to-day — a part of 
 our lives — very frail and feeble, but still our own. Where will 
 she be next New Year's day 1 ' 
 
 ' Ah, Belle, that's a bad look out for both of us,' answered 
 Leonard, seating himself in his mother's empty chair. ' I'm 
 afraid she won't last out the year that begins to-day. But she 
 has seemed brighter and happier lately, hasn't she ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, I think she has been happier,' said Christabel. 
 
 ' Do you know why 1 ' 
 
 His cousin did not answer him. She sat with her face bent 
 over her dog, hiding her tears on Bandie's sleek black head. 
 
 ' I think I know why the mother has been so tranquil in 
 her mind lately, Belle,' said Leonard, with unusual earnestness, 
 'and I think you know just as well as I do. She 'hasj^gji, 
 you and me more friendly together — more cousinly — and she 
 has looked forward to the fulfilment of an old wish and dream of 
 hers. She has looked for the speedy realization of that wish, 
 Belle, although six months ago it seemed hopeless. She wants 
 to see the two people she loves best on earth united, before she 
 is taken away. It would make the close of her life happy, if she 
 could see my happiness secure. I believe you know that. 
 Belle.' 
 
 ' Yes, I know that it is so. But that can never be.' 
 
 ' That is a hard saying, ChristabeL Half a year ago I asked 
 you a question, and you said no. Many a man in my position 
 would have been too proud to run the risk of a second refusal. 
 He would have gone away in a huff, and found comfort some- 
 where else. But I knew that there was only one woman in the 
 the world who could make me happy, and I waited for her. 
 You must own that I have been patient, have I not, Belle ? ' 
 
 ' You have been very devoted to your dear mother — very good 
 to me. I cannot deny that, Leonard,' Christabel answered; 
 gravely. 
 
 She had dried her tears, and lifted her head from the dog's 
 neck, and sat looking straight at the fire, self-possessed and 
 sad. It seemed to her as if all possibility of happiness had gone 
 out of her lif e. 
 
 ' Am I to have no reward 1 ' asked Leonard. s You know 
 with what hope I have waited — you know that our marriage 
 would make my mother happy, that it would make the end of
 
 'That Lip and Voice are Mute for Ever. 169 
 
 ht:r life a festival. You owe me nothing, but you owe her some* 
 thing. That is sueing in formd pauperis, isn't it, Belle I But 1 
 have no pride where you are concerned.' 
 
 ' You ask me to be your wife ; you don't even ask if I love 
 you,' said Christabel, bitterly. ' What if I were to say yes, and 
 then tell you afterwards that my heart still belongs to Angus 
 Hamleigh.' 
 
 ' You had better tell me "that now, if it is so,' said Leonard, 
 liis face darkening in the firelight. 
 
 ' Then I will tell you that it is so. I gave him up because I 
 thought it my duty to give him up. I believed that in honour 
 he belonged to another woman. I believe so still. But I have 
 never left off loving him. That is why I have made up my 
 mind never to marry.' 
 
 ' You are wise,' retorted Leonard, ' such a confession as that 
 would settle for most men. But it does not settle for me, 
 Belle. I am too far gone. If you are a fool about Hamleigh, 
 I am a fool about you. Only say you will marry me, and I will 
 take my chance of all the rest. I. .know you will be a good 
 wife ; and I will be a good husband to you. And I suppose 
 in the end you will get to care for me a little. One thing is 
 Ciirtain, that I can't be happy without you ; so I would gladly 
 run the risk of an occasional taste of misery with you. Come, 
 Belle, is it a bargain,' he pleaded, taking her unresisting hands. 
 '• Say that it is, dearest. Let me kiss the future mistress of 
 Mount Royal.' 
 
 He bent over her and kissed her — kissed those lips which 
 had once been sacred to Angus Hamleigh, which she had sworn 
 in her heart should be kissed by no other man upon earth. She 
 recoiled from him with a shiver of disgust — no good omen for 
 their wedded bliss. 
 
 ' This will make our mother very happy,' said Leonard. 
 Come to her now, Belle, and let us tell her.' 
 
 Christabel went with slow, reluctant steps, ashamed of the 
 weakness which had yielded to persuasion and not to duty. But 
 when Mrs. Tregonell heard the news from the triumphant 
 lover, the light of happiness that shone upon the wan face was 
 almost an all-sufficing reward for this last sacrifice. 
 
 ' My love, my love,' cried the widow, clasping her niece to 
 her breast. 'You have made my last earthly days happy. I 
 have thought you cold and hard. I feared that I should die 
 before you relented ; but now you have made me glad and 
 grateful. I reared you for this, I taught you for this, I have 
 prayed for this ever since you were a child. I have prayed that 
 my son might have a pure and perfect wife, and God had 
 granted my prayer.' 
 
 After this came a period of such perfect content and tran-
 
 170 Mount Boyal. 
 
 quility for the invalid, that Christabel forgot her own sorrows, 
 bhe lived in an atmosphere of gladness ; congratulations, gifts- 
 were pouring in upon her every day ; her aunt petted and 
 cherished her, was never weary of praising and caressing her. 
 Leonard was all submission as a lover. Major Bree was 
 delighted at the security which this engagement promised for 
 the carrying on of the line of Champernownes and Tregonells — 
 the union of two fine estates. He had looked forward to a 
 dismal period when the widow would be laid in her grave, her 
 son a wanderer, and Christabel a resident at Plymouth or Bath ; 
 while spiders wove their webs in shadowy corners of the good 
 old Manor house, and mice, to all appearance self-sustaining, 
 scampered and scurried behind the panelling. 
 
 Jessie Bridgeman was the only member of Christabel's 
 circle who refrained from any expression of approval. 
 
 ' Did I not tell you that you must end by marrying him 1 ' 
 she exclaimed. 'Did I not say that if you stayed here the thing 
 was inevitable 1 Continual dropping will wear away a stone ; 
 the stone is a fixture and can't help being dropped upon ; but 
 if you had stuck to your colours and gone to Leipsic to stud; 
 the piano, you would have escaped the dropping.' 
 
 As there was no possible reason for delay, while there was 
 a powerful motive for a speedy marriage, in the fact of Mrs. 
 Tregonell's precarious health, and her ardent desire to see her 
 son and her niece united before her fading eyes closed for ever 
 upon earth and earthly cares, Christabel was fain to consent 
 to the early date which her aunt and her lover proposed, and to 
 allow all arrangements to be hurried on with that view. 
 
 So in the dawning of the year, when Proserpine's returning 
 footsteps were only faintly indicated by pale snowdrops and 
 early violets lurking in sheltered hedges, and by the gold and 
 purple of crocuses in all the cottage gardens, Christabel put on 
 her wedding gown, and whiter than the pale ivory tint of the 
 soft sheeny satin, took her seat in the carriage beside her adopted 
 mother, to be driven down into the valley, and up the hilly 
 street, where all the inhabitants of Boscastle — save those who 
 bad gone on before to congregate by the lich-gate — were on the 
 alert to see the bride go by. 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell was paler than her niece, the fine regular 
 features blanched with that awful pallor which tells of disease 
 — but her eyes were shining with the light of gladness. 
 
 'My darling,' she murmured, as they drove down to the 
 harbour bridge, ' I have loved you all your life, but never as I love 
 you to-day. My dearest, you have filled my soul with content' 
 
 ' I thank God that it shoixld be so,' faltered Christabel. 
 
 ' If I could only see you smile, dear,' said her aunt. ' Your 
 expression is too sad for a bride.'
 
 *That Lip and Voice are Mute for Ever.' 17l 
 
 ' Is it, Auntie ? But marriage is a serious thing, dear. It 
 means the dedication of a life to duty.' 
 
 ' Duty which affection will make very light, I hop?,' said Mrs. 
 Tregonell, chilled by the cold statuesque face, wrapped in its 
 cloudy veil. ' Christabel, my love, tell me that you are not 
 unhappy — that this marriage is not against your inclination. 
 It is of your own free will that you give yourself to my boy 1 ' 
 
 'Yes, of my own free will,' answered Christabel, firmly. 
 
 As she spoke, it flashed upon her that Iphigenia would have 
 given the same answer before they led her k> the altar of offended 
 Artemis. There are sacrifices offered with the victim's free con- 
 sent, which are not the less sacrifices. 
 
 'Look, dear,' cried her aunt, as the children, clustering at the 
 school-house gate — dismissed from school an hour before their 
 time— waved their sturdy arms, and broke into a shrill trebiu 
 cheer, ' everybody is pleased at this marriage.' 
 
 * If you are glad, dearest, I am content,' murmured her niecf-. 
 
 It was a very quiet wedding — or a wedding which ranks 
 among quiet weddings now-a-days, when nuptial ceremonies are 
 for the most part splendid. No train of bridesmaids in aesthetic 
 colours, Duchess of Devonshire hats, and long mittens — no page- 
 boys, staggering under gigantic baskets of flowers — no fuss or 
 fashion, to make that solemn ceremony a raree-show for the 
 gaping crowd. The Rector of Trevalga's two little girls were 
 the only bridesmaids — dressed after Sir Joshua, in short-waisted 
 dove-coloured frocks and pink sashes, mob caps and mittens, 
 with big bunches of primroses and violets in their chubby 
 hands. 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell looked superb in a dark ruby velvet gown, 
 and long mantle of the same rich stuff, bordered with darkest 
 sable. It was she who gave her niece away, while Major Bree 
 acted as best man for Leonard. There were no guests at this 
 winter wedding. Mrs. Tregonell's frail health was a sufficient 
 reason for the avoidance of all pomp and show ; and Christabel 
 had pleaded earnestly for a very quiet wedding. 
 
 So before that altar where she had hoped to pledge herself 
 for life and till death to Angus Hamleigh, Christabel gave her 
 submissive hand to Leonard Tregonell, while the fatal words 
 were spoken which have changed and blighted some few lives, 
 to set against the many they have blessed and glorified. Still 
 deadly pale, the bride went with the bridegroom to the vesl ry, 
 to sign that book of fate, the register, Mrs. Tregonell following 
 on Major Bree's arm, Miss Bridgeman — a neat little figure in 
 silver grey poplin — and the child bride-maids crowding in after 
 them, until the small vc.-try was filled with a gracious group, all 
 glow of colour and sheen of sdk and satin, in the glad spring 
 Bunshine.
 
 172 Mount Boy at. 
 
 k Now, Mrs. Tregonell,' said the Major, cheerily, when the 
 bride and bridegroom had signed, ' let us have your name next, 
 if you please ; for I don't think there is any of us who mora 
 rejoices in this union than you do.' 
 
 The widow took the pen, and wrote her name below that of 
 Cliristabel, with a hand that never faltered. The incumbent of 
 Minster used to say afterwards that this autograph was the 
 grandest in the register. But the pen dropped suddenly from 
 the hand that had guided it so firmly. Mrs. Tregonell looked 
 round at the circle of faces with a strange wild look in her own. 
 She gave a faint half-stifled cry, and fell upon her son's breast, 
 her arms groping about his shoulders feebly, as if they would 
 fain have wound themselves round his neck, but coidd not, 
 encumbered by the heavy mantle. 
 
 Leonard put his arm round her, and held her firmly to his 
 breast. 
 
 'Dear mother, are you ill?' he asked, alanned by that 
 strange look in the haggard face. 
 
 ' It is the end,' she faltered. ' Don't be sorry, dear. I am so 
 happy.' 
 
 And thus, with a shivering sigh, the weary heart throbbed 
 its last dull beat, the faded eyes grew dim, the limbs were dumb 
 for ever. 
 
 The Eector tried to get Christabel out of the vestry before 
 she could know what had happened — but the bride was clinging 
 to her aunt's lifeless figure, half sustained in Leonard's arms, 
 half resting on the chair which had been pushed forward to 
 support her as she sank upon her son's breast. Vain to seek to 
 delay the knowledge of sorrow. All was known to Christabel 
 already, as she bent over that marble face which was scarcely 
 whiter than her own. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 'not the gods can shake the past. 
 
 There was a sad silent week of waiting before the bride set 
 forth upon her bridal tour, robed in deepest mourning. For six 
 days the windows of Mount Eoyal were darkened, and Leonard 
 and his newly wedded wife kept within the shadow of that house 
 of death, almost as strictly as if they had been Jewish mourners, 
 bound by ancient ceremonial laws, whereof the close observance 
 is a kind of patriotism among a people who have no fatherland. 
 All the hot-houses at Mount Eoyal gave out their treasures — 
 white hyacinths, and rose-flushed cyclamen, gardenia, waxen
 
 Not the Gods can shake I lie Past.' 173 
 
 camellias, faint Dijon roses — for the adornment of the death 
 chamber. The corridor outside that darkened room had an 
 odour of hot-house flowers. The house, folded in silence and 
 darkness, felt like some splendid sepulchre. Leonard was deeply 
 depressed by his mother's death ; more shocked by its sudden- 
 ness, by this discordant note in his triumphant marriage song, 
 than by the actual fact ; this loss having been long discounted in 
 his own mind among the evds of the future. 
 
 Christabel's grief was terrible, albeit she had lived for the 
 last year in constant fear of this affliction. Its bitterness was in 
 no wise lessened because it had been long expected. Never even 
 in her saddest moments had she realized the agony of that parting, 
 the cold dull sense of loneliness, of dismal abandonment, in a 
 loveless, joyless world, when that one beloved friend was taken 
 from her. Leonard tried his best to console her, putting aside 
 his own sorrow, in the endeavour to comfort his bride ; but his 
 efforts at consolation were not happy, for the most part taking 
 the form of philosophical truisms which may be very good in an 
 almanack, or as padding for a country newspaper, but which 
 sound dull and meaningless to the ear of the mourner who says 
 in his heart there was never any sorrow like unto my sorrow. 
 
 In the low sunlight of the March afternoon they laid Mrs. 
 Tregonell's coffin in the family vault, beside the niche whei'e her 
 faithful husband of ten years' wedded life took his last long rest. 
 There, in the darkness, the perfume of many flowers mixing with 
 the cold earthly odours of the tomb, they left her who had for so 
 long been the despotic mistress of Mount Royal ; and then they 
 drove back to the empty house, where the afternoon light that 
 streamed in through newly opened windows had a garish look, as 
 if it had no right to be there. 
 
 The widow's will was of the simplest. She left legacies to the 
 old servants ; her wardrobe, with the exception of laces and furs, to 
 Dormer ; mementoes to a few old friends ; two thousand pounds 
 in trust for certain small local charities ; to Chiistabel all her 
 jewels and books ; and to her son everything else of which she 
 died possessed. He was now by inheritance from his mother, 
 and in right of his wife, mas' er of the Champernowne estate, 
 which, united to the Tregonell property, made him one of the 
 largest landowners in the West of England. Christabel's 
 fortune had been strictly settled on herself before her marriage, 
 with reversion to Leonard in the failure of children ; but the 
 faet of this settlement, to which he had readily agreed, did not 
 lessen Leonard's sense of importance as representative of the 
 Tregonells and Champernownes. 
 
 Christabel and her husband started for the Continent on 
 the day after the funeral, Leonard fervently hoping that change 
 of scene ami constant movement would help his wife to forget
 
 174 Mount Royal. 
 
 her grief. It was a dreary departure for a honeymoon tour — 
 the sombre dress of bride and bridegroom, the doleful visage of 
 Dormer, the late Mrs. Tregonell's faithful maid, whom the 
 present Mrs. Tregonell retained for her own service, glad to 
 have a person about her who had so dearly loved the dead. 
 They travelled to "Weymouth, crossed to Cherbourg, and thence 
 to Paris, and on without stopping to Bordeaux . then, following 
 the line southward, they visited all the most interesting towns 
 of southern France — Albi, Montauban, Toulouse, Carcassonne, 
 Narbonne, Montpellier, Nismes, and so to the fairy-like shores 
 of the Mediterranean, lingering on their way to look at mediaeval 
 cathedrals, Roman baths and amphitheatres, citadels, prisons, 
 palaces, aqueducts, all somewhat dry as dust and tiresome to 
 Leonard, but full of interest to Christabel, who forgot her own 
 griefs as she pored over these relics of pagan and Christian history. 
 
 Nice was in all its glory of late spring when, after a lingerin',' 
 progress, they arrived at that Brighton of the south. It wis 
 nearly six weeks since that March sunset which had lighted the 
 funeral procession in Minster Churchyard, and Christabel \. as 
 beginning to grow accustomed to the idea of her aunt's death — 
 nay, had begun to look back with a dim sense of wonder at the 
 happy time in which they two had been together, their love 
 unclouded by any fear of doom and parting. That last year of 
 Mrs. Tregonell's life had been Christabel's apprenticeship to 
 grief. All the gladness and thoughtlessness of youth had been 
 blighted by the knowledge of an inevitable parting — a farewell 
 that most soon be spoken — a dear hand clasped fondly to-day, 
 but which must be let go to-morrow. 
 
 Under that soft southern sky a faint bloom came back to 
 Christabel's cheeks, which had not until now lost the wan 
 whiteness they had worn on her wedding-day. She grew mors 
 cheerful, talked brightly and pleasantly to her husband, and put 
 off the aspect of gloom with the heavy crape- shrouded gown 
 which marked the first period of her mourning. She came 
 down to dinner one evening in a gown of rich lustreless black 
 silk, with a cluster of Cape jasmine among the folds of her 
 white crape fichu, whereat Leonard rejoiced exceedingly, his 
 being one of those philosophic minds which believe that the tco 
 brief days of the living should never be frittered away upon 
 lamentations for the dead. 
 
 ' You're looking uncommonly jolly, Belle,' said Leonard, aa 
 his wife took her seat at the little table in front of an open 
 window overlooking the blue water and the amphitheatre of 
 hills, glorified by the sunset. They were dining at a private 
 table in the public room of the hotel, Leonard having a fancy 
 for the life and bustle of the table d'hote rather than the 
 seclusion of his own apartments. Christabel hated sitting dowa
 
 Not tlie Gods can shake the PisV 
 
 with a herd of strangers ; so, by way of compromise, they dined 
 at their own particular table, and looked on at the public 
 banquet, as at a stage-play enacted for their amusement. 
 
 There were others who preferred the exclusiveness of a 
 separate table ; among these two middle-aged men — one military. 
 i both new arrivals — who sat within earshot of Mr. and Mrs. 
 Tregonell. 
 
 ' That's a fascinating get-up, Belle,' pursued Leonard, proud 
 of his wife's beauty, and not displeased at a few respectful 
 glances from the men at the neighbouring table which that 
 beauty had elicited. 'By-the-by, why shouldn't we go to the 
 opera to-night ? They do " Traviata ;" none of your Wagner 
 stuff, but one of the few operas a fellow can understand. It will 
 cheer you up a bit.' 
 
 ' Thank you, Leonard. You are very good to think of it ; 
 but I had rather not go to any place of amusement — this year.' 
 
 ' That's rank rubbish, Belle. What can it matter — here, 
 where nobody knows us 1 And do you suppose it can make any 
 difference to my poor mother ? Her sleep will be none the less 
 tranquil.' 
 
 ' I know that ; but it pleases me to honour her memory. I 
 will go to the opera as often as you like next year, Leonard.' 
 
 ' You may go or stay away, so far as I'm concerned,' answered 
 Leonard, with a sulky air. ' I only suggested the thing on your 
 account. 1 hate their squalling.' 
 
 This was not the first time that Mr. Tregonell had shown the 
 cloven foot during that prolonged honeymoon. He was not 
 actually unkind to his wife. He indulged her fancies for the 
 most part, even when they went counter to his ; he would have 
 loaded her with gifts, had she been willing to accept them ; he 
 was the kind of spouse who, in the estimation of the outside 
 world, passes as a perfect husband — proud, fond, indulgent, 
 lavish — just the kind of husband whom a sensuous, selfish woman 
 would consider absolutely adorable from a practical standpoint ; 
 supplementing him, perhaps, with the ideal, in the person of a 
 lover. 
 
 So far, Christabel's wedded life had gone smoothly ; for in 
 the measure of her sacrifice she had included obedience and duty 
 after marriage. Yet there was not an hour in which she did not 
 feel the utter want of sympathy between her and the man she 
 had married — not a day in which she did not discover his 
 inability to understand her, to think as she thought, to see as she 
 saw. Religion, conscience, honour — for all these husband and 
 wife had a different standard. That which was right to one was 
 wrong to the oth r. Th ir sense of the beautiful, their estimation 
 of art, \ i rt as earth and heaven. How could any 
 
 union prove happy — how could there be even that smooth peaeo.
 
 170 Mount Boyal. 
 
 fulness which blesses some passionless unions — when the husband 
 and wife were of so different a clay ? Long as Leonard had 
 known and loved his cousin, he was no more at home with her 
 than he would have been with Undine, or with that ivory image 
 which Aphrodite warmed into life at the prayer of Pygmalion 
 the sculptor. 
 
 More than once during these six weeks of matrimony Leonard 
 had betrayed a jealous temper, which threatened evil in the 
 future. His courtship had been one long struggle at self- 
 repression. Marriage gave him back his liberty, and he used it 
 on more than one occasion to sneer at his wife's former lover, or 
 at her fidelity to a cancelled vow. Christabel had understood 
 his meaning only too well ; but she had heard him in a scornful 
 silence which was more humiliating than any other form of 
 reproof. 
 
 After that offer of the opera, Mr. Tregonell lapsed into 
 silence. His subjects for conversation were not widely varied, 
 and his present position, aloof from all spotting pursuits, and 
 poorly provided with the London papers, reduced him almost to 
 dumbness. Just now he was silent from temper, and went on 
 sulkily with his dinner, pretending to be absorbed by consider- 
 ation of the wines and dishes, most of which he pronounced 
 abominable. 
 
 When he had finished his dinner, he took out his cigarette 
 case, and went out on the balcony to smoke, leaving Christabel 
 sitting alone at her little table. 
 
 The two Englishmen at the table in che next window were 
 talking in a comfortable, genial kind of way, and in voices quite 
 loud enough to be overheard by their immediate neighbours. 
 The soldier-like man sat back to back with Christabel, and she 
 could not avoid hearing the greater part of his conversation. 
 
 She heard with listless ears, neither understanding nor 
 interested in understanding the drift of his talk — her mind far 
 o,way in the home she had left, a desolate and ruined home, as it 
 seemed to her, now that her aunt was dead. But by-and-by the 
 sound of a too familiar name rivetted her attention. 
 
 ' Angus Hamleigh, yes ! I saw his name in the visitor's 
 book. He was here last month — gone on to Italy,' said the 
 soldier. 
 
 1 You knew him ? ' asked the other. 
 
 1 Dans le temps. I saw a good deal of him when he waa 
 about town.' 
 
 ' Went a mucker, didn't he ? ' 
 
 'I believe he spent a good deal of money — but he never 
 belonged to an out-and-out fast lot. Went in for art and 
 A\ul literature, and that kind of thing, don't you know 1 Garrick 
 Club, behind the scenes at the swell theatres — Eichmond and
 
 'Not the Gods can shake the Past.' 177 
 
 Greenwich dinners — Maidenhead — Henley — lived in a house- 
 boat one summer, men used to go down by the last train to 
 moonlit suppers after the play. He had some very good ideas, 
 ami carried them out on a large scale — but he never dropped 
 money on cards, or racing — rather looked down upon the 
 amusements of the million. By-the-by, I was at a rather curious 
 wedding just before I left London.' 
 
 ' Whose ? ' 
 
 'Little Fishky's. The Colonel came up to time at last.' 
 
 'Fishky,' interrogated the civilian, vaguely. 
 
 ' Don't you know Fishky, alias Psyche, the name by which 
 Stella Mayne condescended to be known by her intimate friends 
 during the run of " Cupid and Psyche.' Colonel Luscomb 
 married her last week at St. George's, and I was at the 
 wedding.' 
 
 ' 11 ither feeble of him, wasn't it ?' asked the civilian. 
 
 ' Well, you see, he could hardly sink himself lower than he 
 had done already by his infatuation for the lady. He knew 
 that all his chances at the Horse Guards were gone ; so if a plain 
 gold ring could gratify a young person who had been surfeited 
 with diamonds, why should our friend withhold that simple and 
 inexpensive ornament 1 Whether the lady and gentleman will 
 be any the happier for this rehabilitation of their domestic 
 circumstances, is a question that can only be answered in the 
 future. The wedding was decidedly queer.' 
 
 ' In what way 1 ' 
 
 ' It was a case of vaulting ambition which o'er-leaps itself. 
 The Colonel wanted a quiet wedding. I think he would have 
 preferred the registrar's office — no church-going, or fuss of any 
 kind — but the lady, to whom matrimony was a new idea, 
 willed otherwise. So she decided that the nest in St. John's 
 Wood was not spacious enough to accommodate the wedding 
 guests. She sent her invitations far and wide, and ordered a 
 recherche breakfast at an hotel in Brook Street. Of the sixty 
 people she expected about fifteen appeared, and there was a 
 rowdy air about those select few, male and female, which was 
 by no means congenial to the broad glare of day. Night 
 birds, every one — painted cheeks — dyed moustachios — tremulous, 
 hands — a foreshadowing of del. trem. in the very way some 
 of them swallowed their champagne. I was sorry for Fishky, 
 who looked lovely ia her white satin frock and orange-blossoms, 
 but who had a piteous droop about the corners of her lips, 
 like a child whose birthday feast has gone wrong. I felt 
 still sorrier for the Colonel — a proud man debased by low 
 surroundings.' 
 
 ' He will take Iher off the stage, I suppose,' suggested th* 
 other. 
 
 a
 
 1^8 Mount Boyal. 
 
 ' Naturally, he will try to do so. He'll make a good fight 
 for it, I dare say ; but whether he can keep Fishky from the 
 footlights is an open question. I know he's in debt, and I 
 don't very clearly see how they are to live.' 
 
 ' She is very fond of him, isn't she 1 ' 
 
 ( Yes, I believe so. She jilted Hamleigh, a man who wor- 
 shipped her, to take up with Luscomb, so I suppose it was a 
 case of real affection.' 
 
 ' I was told that she was in very bad health — consumptive 1 ' 
 
 'That sort of little person is always dying,' answered the 
 other carelessly. It is a part of the metier — the Marguerite 
 Gauthier, drooping lily kind of young woman. But I believe 
 this one is sickly.' 
 
 ' Christabel heard every word of this conversation, heard 
 &nd understood for the first time that her renunciation of 
 her lover had been useless — that the reparation she had deemed 
 it his duty to make, was past making — that the woman to 
 whose wounded character she had sacrificed her own happiness 
 was false and unworthy. She had been fooled — betrayed by 
 her own generous instincts — her own emotional impulses. It 
 would have been better for her and for Angus if she had been 
 more worldly-minded — less innocent of the knowledge of evil. 
 She had blighted her own life, and perhaps his, for an imaginary 
 good. Nothing had been gained to any one living by her 
 sacrifice. 
 
 ' I thought I was doing my duty,' she told herself helplessly, 
 as she sat looking out at the dark water, above which the moon 
 was rising in the cloudless purple of a southern night. ' Oh ! 
 how wicked that woman was to hide the truth from me — to let 
 me sacrifice my love and my lover — knowing her own falsehood 
 all the time. And now she is the wife of another man ! How 
 she must have laughed at my folly ! I thought it was Angu3 
 who had deserted her, and that if I gave him up, hi3 own 
 honourable feeling would lead him to atone for that past wrong. 
 And now I know that no good has been done — only infinite 
 evil.' 
 
 She thought of Angus, a lonely wanderer on the face of the 
 earth ; jilted by the first woman he had loved, renounced by 
 the second, with no close ties of kindred — uncared for and 
 alone. It was hard for her to think of this, whose dearest hope 
 had once been to devote her life to caring for him and cherishing 
 him — prolonging that frail existence by the tender ministrations 
 of a boundless love. She pictured him in his loneliness, careless 
 of his health, wasting his brief remnant of life — reckless, hope- 
 less, indifferent. 
 
 ' God grant he may fall in love with some good woman, who 
 •sill cherish him as I would have done,' was her unselfish prayer •
 
 e 
 
 'Not the Gods can shake the Past.' 179 
 
 for she knew that domestic affection is the only spell that can 
 prolong a fragile life. 
 
 It was a weak thing no doubt next morning, when she was 
 passing through the hall of the hotel, to stop at the desk on 
 which the visitors' book was kept, and to look back through the 
 signatures of the last three weeks for that one familiar auto- 
 graph which she had such faint chance of ever seeing again in 
 the future. How boldly that one name seemed to stand out 
 from the page ; and even coming upon it after a deliberate 
 search, what a thrill it sent through her veins ! The signature 
 was as firm as of old. She tried to think that this was an indi- 
 cation of health and strength — but later in the same day, when 
 she was alone in her sitting-room, and her tea was brought to 
 her by a German waiter — one of those superior men whom 
 it is hard to think of as a menial — she ventured to ask a 
 question. 
 
 ' There was an English gentleman staying here about three 
 weeks ago : a Mr. Hamleigh. Do you remember him 1 ' she 
 asked. 
 
 The waiter interrogated himself silently for half a minute, 
 and then replied in the affirmative. 
 
 ' Was he an invalid ? ' 
 
 ' Not quite an invalid, Madame. He went out a little — but 
 he did not seem robust. He never went to the opera — or to any 
 public entertainment. He rode a little — and drove a little — and 
 read a great deal. He was much fonder of books than most 
 English gentlemen.' 
 
 ' Do you know where he went when he left here 1 ' 
 
 * He was going to the Italian lakes.' 
 
 Christabel asked no further question. It seemed to her a 
 great privilege to have heard even so much as this. There was 
 very little hope that in her road of life she would often come 
 bo nearly on her lost lover's footsteps. She was too wise to 
 desire that they should ever meet face to face — that she, 
 Leonard's wife, should ever again be moved by the magic of 
 that voice, thrilled by the pathos of those dreamy eyes ; but 
 it was a privilege to hear something about him she had lost, 
 to know what spot of earth held him, what skies looked down 
 upon him.
 
 180 Mount Royal. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 'i HAVE PUT MY DATS AND DREAMS OUT OF MIND.* 
 
 It was the end of May, when Christabel and her husband weDt 
 back to England and to Mount Royal. Leonard wanted to stay 
 in London for the season, and to participate in the amusements 
 and dissipation of that golden time ; but this his wife most 
 steadfastly refused. She would be guilty of no act which coidd 
 imply want of respect for her beloved dead. She would 
 not make her curtsey to her sovereign in her new character of a 
 matron, or go into society, within the year of her aunts death. 
 
 'You will be horribly moped in Cornwall,' remonstrated 
 Leonard ' Evervthiner &bout the place, will remind w *fi. ■ ■ 
 poor mother. We shall be in the dolefuls all the year.' 
 
 ' I would rather grieve for her than forget ber,' answered 
 Christabel. 'It is too easy to forget.' 
 
 '"Well, you must have your own way, I suppose. You 
 generally do,' retorted Leonard, churlishly ; ' and, af cer having 
 dragged me about a lot of mouldy old French towns, and made 
 me look at churches, and Roman baths, and the sites of ancient 
 circuses, until I hated the very name of antiquity, you will expect 
 me to vegetate at Mount Royal for the next six months.' 
 
 'I don't see any reason why a quiet life should be mere 
 vegetation,' said Christabel ; ' but if you would prefer to spend 
 part of the year in London I can stay at Mount Royal.' 
 
 'And get on uncommonly well without me,' cried Leonard. 
 'I perfectly comprehend your meaning. But I am not going in 
 for that kind of thing. You and 1 must not offer the world 
 another example of the semi-attached couple ; or else people 
 might begin to say you had married a man you did not care for.' 
 
 ■I will try and make your life as agreeable as I can at the 
 Manor, Leonard,' Christabel answered, with supreme equanimity 
 —it was an aggravation to her husband that she so rarely lost 
 her - temper — 'so long as you do not ask me to till the house with 
 visitors, or to do anything that might look like want of reverence 
 for your mother's memory. 1 
 
 Look!' ejaculated Leonard. What does it matter how 
 things look 1 We both know that we are sorry .fur having loit 
 her — that we shall miss her more or less every day of our lives 
 — visitors or no visitors. However, you needn't invite any 
 people. I can rub on with a little fishin' and boatin'.' 
 
 They went back to Mount Royal, where all things had goix 
 as if by clockwork during their absence, under Miss Lridgeman'a 
 sage administration. To relieve her loneliness, Christabel had
 
 l I have Put my Days and Dreams out of Mind.' 181 
 
 invited two of the younger sisters from Shepherd's Bush to spend 
 the spring months at the Manor House — and these damsels — 
 tall, vigorous, active — had revelled exceedingly in all the luxuries 
 and pleasures of a rural life under the most advantageous cir- 
 cumstances. They had scoured the hills — had rifled the hedge* 
 of their abundant wild flowers — had made friends with aft 
 Christabel's chosen families in the surrounding cottages — had 
 fallen in love with the curate who was doing duty at Minster and 
 Forrabury — had been buffeted by the winds and tossed by the 
 waves in many a delightful boating excursion — had climbed the 
 rocky steeps of Tintagel so often that they seemed to know every 
 stone of that ruined citadel — and now had gone home to Shepherd's 
 Bush, their cheeks bright with country bloom, and their meagre 
 trunks overshadowed by a gigantic hamper of country produce. 
 
 Christabel felt a bitter pang as the carnage drew up to the 
 porch, and she saw the neat little figure in a black gown waiting 
 to receive her — thinking of that tall and noble form which should 
 have stood there — the welcoming arms which should have received 
 her, rewarding and blessing her for her self-sacrifice. The sacrifice 
 had been made, but death had swallowed up the blessing and 
 reward ; and in that intermediate land of slumber where the 
 widow lay there could be no knowledge of gain — no satisfaction 
 in the thought of her son's happiness : even granting that Leonard 
 was supremely happy in his marriage, a fact which Christabel 
 deemed open to doubt. No, there had been nothing gained, 
 except that Diana Tregonell's last days had been full of peace — 
 her one cherished hope realized on the very threshold of the 
 tomb. Christabel tried to take comfort from this knowledge. 
 
 ' If I had denied her to the Lost, if she had died with her 
 wish ungratified, I think I should be still more sorry for her loss,' 
 she told herself. 
 
 There was bitter pain in the return to a home where that one 
 familiar figure had been the central point, the very axi* of life. 
 Jessie led the new Mrs. Tregonell into the panelled parlour, 
 where every object was arranged just as in the old days ; the 
 tea-table on the left of the wide fireplace, the large low arm-chair 
 and the book-table on the right. The room was bright with 
 white and crimson may, azaleas, tea-roses. 
 
 1 1 thought it was best for you to get accustomed to the 
 rooms without her,' said Jessie, in a low voice, as she placed 
 Christabel in the widow's old chair, and helped to take off her 
 hat and mantle, ' and I thought you would not like anything 
 changed.' 
 
 ' Not for worlds. The house is a part of her, in my mind. 
 It was she who planned everything as it now is — just adding 
 as many new things as were needful to binghten the old. I will 
 never alter a detail unless I am absolutely obliged.'
 
 182 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' I am so thankful to hear you say that. Major Bree ia 
 coming to dinner. He wanted to be among the first to welcome 
 you. I hope you don't mind my having told him he might 
 come.' 
 
 ' I shall be very glad to see him : he is a part of my old life 
 here. 1 hope he is very well.' > 
 
 ' Splendid— the soul of activity and good temper. I can t 
 tell you how good he was to my sisters — taking them about 
 everywhere. I believe they both went away deeply in love with 
 him ; or at least, with their affections divided between him and 
 Mr. Ponsonby. 
 
 Mr. Ponsonby was the curate, a bachelor, and of pleasing 
 appearance. 
 
 Leonard had submitted reluctantly to the continued resi- 
 dence of Miss Bridgeman at Mount Koyal. _ He had been for 
 dismissing her, as a natural consequence of his mother's death ; 
 but here again Christabel had been firm. 
 
 'Jessie is my only intimate friend,' she said, 'and she ia 
 associated with every year of my girlhood. She will be no 
 trouble to you, Leonard, and she will help me to save your 
 money.' 
 
 This last argument had a softening effect. Mr. Tregonell 
 knew that Jessie Bridgeman was a good manager. He had 
 affected to despise her economies while it was his mother's purse 
 which was spared ; but now that the supplies were drawn from 
 his own resources he was less disposed to he contemptuous of 
 care in the administrator of his household. 
 
 Major Bree was in the drawing-room when Christabel came 
 down dressed for dinner, looking delicately lovely in her flowing 
 gown of soft dull black, with white flowers and white crape 
 about her neck. The Major's cheerful presence did much to 
 help Mr. Tregonell and his wife through that first dinner at 
 Mount Royal. He had so many small local events to tell them 
 about, news too insignificant to be recorded in Jessie's letters, 
 but not without interest for Christabel, who loved place and 
 people. Then after dinner he begged his hostess to play, 
 declaring that he had not heard any good music during her 
 absence, and Christabel, who had cultivated her musical talents 
 assiduously in every interval of loneliness and leisure which had 
 occurred in the course of her bridal tour, was delighted to play 
 to a listener who could understand and appreciate the loftiest 
 flights in harmony. 
 
 The Major was struck with the improvement in her style. 
 She had always played sweetly, but not with this breadth and 
 
 /ower. 
 
 ' You must have worked very hard in these last few months, 
 
 he said.
 
 •7 have Put my Days and Dreams out of Mma.' 183 
 
 ' Yes, I made the best of every opportunity. I had some 
 lessons from a very clever German professor at Nice. Music 
 kept me from brooding on my loss,' she added, in a low voice. 
 
 ' I hope you will not grow less industrious now you have 
 come home,' said the Major. ' Most woman give Mozart and 
 Beethoven to the winds when they marry, shut up their piano 
 altogether, or at most aspire to play a waltz for their children's 
 daccing. 
 
 ' I shall not be one of those. Music will be my chief pur- 
 suit — now.' 
 
 The Major felt that although this was a very proper state 
 of things from an artistic point of view, it argued hardly so 
 well for the chances of matrimonial bliss. That need of a 
 pursuit after marriage indicated a certain emptiness in the 
 existence of the wife. A life closed and rounded in the narrow 
 circle of a wedding ring hardly leaves room for the assiduous 
 study of art. 
 
 And now began for Christabel a life which seemed to her to 
 be in some wise a piece of mechanism, an automatic performance 
 of daily recurring duties, an hourly submission to society which 
 had no" charm for her — a life which would have hung as heavily 
 upon her spirit as the joyless monotony of a convict prison, had 
 it not been for the richness of her own mental resources, and 
 her love of the country in which she lived. She could not be 
 altogether unhappy roaming with her old friend Jessie over 
 those wild romantic hills, or facing the might of that tremendous 
 ocean, grand and somewhat awful even in its calmest aspect. 
 Nor was she unhappy, seated in her own snug morning-room 
 among the books she loved — books which wero always opening 
 new worlds of thought and wonder, books of such inexhaustible 
 interest that she was often inclined to give way to absolute 
 despair at the idea of how much of this world's wisdom must 
 remain unexplored even at the end of a long life. De Quincey 
 has shown by figures that not the hardest reader can read half 
 the good old books that are worth reading ; to say nothing of 
 those new books daily claiming to be read. 
 
 No, for a thoroughly intellectual woman, loving music, loving 
 the country, tender and benevolent to the poor, such a life an 
 Christabel was called upon to lead in this first year of marriage 
 could not be altogether unhappy. Here were two people joined 
 by the strongest of all human ties, and yet utterly unsym- 
 pathetic ; but they were not always in each other's company, 
 and when they were together the wife did her best to appeal 
 contented with her lot, and to make life agreeable to her hus- 
 band. She was more punctilious in the performance of eveiy 
 duty she owed him than she would have been had she loved 
 him better. She never forgot that his welfare was a charge
 
 184 Mount Royal. 
 
 which she had taken upon herself to please the kinswoman to 
 whom she owed so much. The debt was all the more sacred 
 since she to whom it was due had passed away to the land 
 where there is no knowledge of earthly conduct. 
 
 The glory of summer grew and faded, the everlasting hill) 
 changed with all the varying lights and shadows of autuinj 
 and winter ; and in the tender early spring, when all the tree 
 were budding, and the hawthorn hedges were unfolding crinkr* 
 green leaves among the brown, Christabel's heart melted with 
 the new strange emotion of maternal love. A son was born to 
 the lord of the manor ; and while all Boscastle rejoiced at this 
 important addition to the population, Christabel's pale face 
 shone with a new radiance, as the baby-face looked up at her 
 from the pillow by her side — eyes clear and star-like, with a 
 dreamy, far-away gaze, which was almost more lovely than the 
 recognizing looks of older eyes — a being hardly sentient of the 
 things of earth, but bright with memories of the spirit world. 
 
 The advent of this baby-boy gave a new impulse to Chris- 
 tabel's life. She gave herself up to these new cares and duties 
 with intense devotion ; and for the next six months of her life 
 was so entirely engrossed by her child that Leonard considered 
 himself neglected. She deferred her presentation at Court till 
 the next season, and Leonard was compelled to be satisfied with 
 an occasional brief holiday in London, during which he naturally 
 relapsed into the habits of his bachelor days — dined and gamed 
 at the old clubs, and went about everywhere with his friend and 
 ally, Jack Vandeleur. 
 
 Christabel had been married two years, and her boy was a 
 year old, when she went back to the old house in Bolton Bow 
 with her husband, to enjoy her second season of fashionable 
 pleasures. How hard it was to return, under such altered 
 circumstances, to the rooms in which she had been so happy — to 
 see everything unchanged except her own life. The very chairs 
 and tables seemed to be associated with old joys, old griefs. 
 All the sharp agony of that bitter day on which she had made 
 up her mind to renounce Angus Hamleigh came back to her as 
 she looked round the room in which the pain had been suffered. 
 The flavour of old memories was mixed with all the enjoyments 
 of the present. The music she heard this year was the same 
 music they two had heard together. And here was this smiling 
 Bark, all green leaves and sunlight, filled with this seeming 
 frivolous crowd ; in almost every detail the scene they two had 
 contemplated, amused and philosophical, four years ago. 
 
 The friends who called on her and invited her now, were the 
 same people among whom she had visited during her first season. 
 Beople who had been enraptured at her engagement to Mi". 
 Hamleigh were equally delighted at her marriage with her
 
 'And Pale from the Past we draw nigh Thee.' 185 
 
 cousin, or at least said so ; albeit, more than one astute matron 
 drove away from Bolton Row sighing over the folly of marriage 
 between lirst cousins, and marvelling that Christabel's baby was 
 not deaf, blind, or idiotic. 
 
 Among other old acquaintances, young Mrs. Tregonell met the 
 Dowager Lady Cuniberbridge, at a great dinner, more Medusa- 
 like than ever, hi a curly auburn wig after Madame de Mon- 
 tespan, and a diamond coronet. Christabel shrank from the too- 
 well -remembered figure with a faint shudder ; but Lady Cum- 
 ber! nidge swooped upon lier like an elderly hawk, when the 
 ladies were on their way back to the drawing-room, and insisted 
 upon being friendly. 
 
 ' My dear child, where have you been hiding yourself all 
 these years ]' she exclaimed, in her fine baritone. ' I saw your 
 marriage in the papers, and your poor aunt's death ; and I was 
 expecting to meet you and your husband in society last season. 
 You didn't come to town ? A baby, I suppose ? Just so ! Those 
 horrid babies ! In the coming century there will be some better 
 arrangement for carrying on the species. How well you are 
 looking, and your husband is positively charming. He sat next 
 me at dinner, and we were friends in a moment. How proud he 
 is of you ! It is quite touching to see a man so devoted to his 
 wife ; and now' — they were in the subdued light of the drawing- 
 room by this time, light judiciously tempered by ruby-coloured 
 Venetian glass — 'now tell me all about my poor friend. Was 
 she Ions; ill V 
 
 And, with a ghoulish interest in horrors, the dowager pre- 
 pared herself for a detailed narration of Mrs. Tregonell's last 
 illness ; but Christabel could only falter out a few brief sentences. 
 Even now she could hardly speak of her aunt without tears ; and 
 it ^as painful to talk of her to this worldly dowager, with keen 
 nye3 glittering under penthouse brows, and a hard, eager inouth. 
 
 In all that London season, Christabel only once heard her old 
 lover's name, carelessly mentioned at a dinner party. He was 
 talked of as a guest at some diplomatic dinner at St. Petersburg, 
 "Jarly in the year. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 •and pale from the past we draw xioh thee.' 
 
 It was October, and the chestnut leaves were falling slowly and 
 heavily in the park at Mount Royal, the oaks upon the hill side 
 were faintly tinged with bronze and gold, while the purpla bloom
 
 186 Mount Royal. 
 
 of the heather and the yellow flower of the gorze were seen n 
 rarer patches amidst the sober tints of autumn. It was the title 
 at which to some eyes this Cornish coast was most lovely, with a 
 ?ubdued poetic loveliness — a dreamy beauty touched with tender 
 melancholy. 
 
 Mount Eoyal was delightful at this season. Liberal fires in 
 all the rooms filled the old oak -panelled house with a glow of 
 colour, and a sense of ever-present warmth that was very com-? 
 fortable after the sharpness of October breezes. Those green- 
 houses and hothouses, which had been for so many years Mrs. 
 Tregonell's perpetual care, how disgorged their choicest contents. 
 Fragile white and yellow asters, fairy-like ferns, Dijon roses, 
 lilies of the valley, stephanotis, mignonette, and Cape jasmine 
 filled the rooms with perfume. Modern blinds of diapered 
 crimson and grey subdued the light of those heavily mullioned 
 windows which had been originally designed with a view to 
 strength and architectual effect, rather than to the admission of 
 the greatest possible amount of daylight. The house at this 
 season of the year seemed made for warmth, so thick the walls, 
 so heavily curtained the windows ; just as in the height of 
 summer it seemed made for coolness. Christabel had respected 
 all her aunt's ideas and prejudices : nothing had been changed 
 since Mrs. Tregonell's death — save for that one sad fact that she 
 was gone. The noble matronly figure, the handsome face, the 
 kindly smile were missing from the house where the widow had 
 so long reigned, an imperious but a beneficent mistress — having 
 her own way in all things, but always considerate of other 
 people's happiness and comfort. 
 
 Mr. Tregonell was inclined to be angry with his wife some- 
 times for her religious adherence to her aunt's principles and 
 opinions in things great and small. 
 
 ' You are given over body and soul to my poor mother's fads, 
 he said. ' Jf it had not been for you I should have turned the 
 bouse out of windows when she was gone — got rid of all the 
 worm-eaten furniture, broken out new windows, and let in more 
 light. One feels half asleep in a house where there is nothing 
 but shadow and the scent of hothouse flowers. I should have 
 given carte blanche to some London man — the fellow who writes 
 verses and who invented the storks and sunflower style of 
 decoration — and have let him refurnish the saloon and music- 
 room, pitch out a library which nobody reads, and substitute 
 half a dozen dwarf book-cases in gold and ebony, filled with 
 brightly bound books, and with Japanese jars and bottles on the 
 top of them to give life and colour to the oak panelling. I hate 
 a gloomy house.' 
 
 ' Oh, Leonard, you surely would not call Mount Eoyal 
 gloomy.'
 
 'And Pale from the Past we draw nigh Thee.' 187 
 
 ' But I do : I hate a house that smells of one's ancestors.' 
 
 'Just now you objected to the scent of th« flowers.' 
 
 'You are always catching me up — there was never such a 
 woman to argue — but I mean what I say. The smell is a com- 
 bination of stephanotis and old bones. I wish you would let me 
 build you a villa at Torquay or Dartmouth. I think I should 
 prefer Dartmouth : it's a better place for yachting.' 
 
 1 You are very kind, but I would rather live at Mount Royal 
 than anywhere else. Remember I was brought up here.' 
 
 ' A reason for your being heartily sick of the house — as I am. 
 But I suppose in your case there are associations — sentimental 
 associations.' 
 
 ' The house is filled with memories of my second mother ! ' 
 
 ' Yes— and there are other memories — associations which you 
 love to nurse and brood upon. I think I know all about it — can 
 read up your feelings to a nicety.' 
 
 ' You can think and say what you please, Leonard,' she 
 answered, looking at him with unaltered calmness, 'but you 
 will never make me disown my love of this place and its sur- 
 roundings. You will never make me ashamed of being fond of 
 the home in which I have spent my life.' 
 
 ' 1 begin to think there is very little shame in you,' Leonard 
 muttered to himself, as he walked away. 
 
 He had said many bitter words to his wife — had aimed many 
 a venomed arrow at her breast — but he had never made her 
 blush, and he had never made her cry. There were times when 
 dull hopeless anger consumed him — anger against her — against 
 nature — against Fate — and wb"u his only relief was to be found 
 in harsh and bitter speech, in dark and sullen looks. It would 
 have been a greater relief to him if his shots had gone home — if 
 his brutality had elicited any sign of distress. But in this 
 respect Christabel was hercic. She who had never harboured 
 an ungenerous thought was moved only to a cold calm scorn by 
 the unjust and ungenerous conduct of her husband. Her con- 
 tempt was too thorough for the possibility of resentment. 
 Once, and once only, she attempted to reason with a fool in his folly. 
 
 ' Why do you make these unkind speeches, Leonard 1 ' she 
 asked, looking at him with those calm eyes before which his 
 were apt to waver and look downward, hardly able to endure 
 that steady gaze. ' Why are you always harping upon the past 
 — as if it were an offence against you. Is there anything that 
 you have to complain of in my conduct — have I given you any 
 cause for anger ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, no, none. You are simply perfect as a wife — everybody 
 says so — and in the multitude of counsellors, you know. But ft 
 is just possible for perfection to be a trifle cold and unapproach- 
 able — to keep a man at arm's length — and to have an ever-
 
 188 Mount Royal. 
 
 present air of living in. the past which is galling to a husband 
 who would like — well — a little less amiability, and a little mow 
 election. By Heaven, I would n't mind my wife being a devil, 
 V I knew she was fond of me. A spitOre, who would kiss me 
 one minute and claw me the next, would be better than the 
 calm superiority which is always looking over my head.' 
 
 ' Leonard, I don't think I have been wanting in affection. 
 You have done a great deal to repel my liking — yes — since you 
 force me to speak plainly — you have made my duty as a wife 
 more difficult than it need have been. But, have I ever for- 
 gotten that you are my husband, and the father of my child ? 
 Is there any act of my life which has denied or made light of 
 your authority 1 "When you asked me to marry you I kept no 
 secrets from you : I was perfectly frank.' 
 
 ' Devilish frank,' muttered Leonard. 
 
 ' You knew that I could not feel for you as I had felt for 
 another. These things can come only once in a lifetime. You 
 were content to accept my affection — my obedience — knowing 
 this. Why do you make what I told you then a reproach 
 against me now ! ' 
 
 He could not dispute the justice of this reproof. 
 
 ' Well, Christabel, I was wrong, I suppose. It would have 
 been more gentlemanlike to hold my tongue. I ought to know 
 that your first girlish fancy is a thing of the past — altogether 
 gone and done with. It was idiotic to harp upon that worn-out 
 string, wasn't it?' he asked, laughing awkwardly: but when 
 a man feels savage he must hit out at some one.' 
 
 This was the only occasion on which husband and wife had 
 ever spoken plainly of the past ; but Leonard let fly those venomed 
 arrows of his on the smallest provocation. He could not forget 
 that his wife had loved another man better than she had ever 
 loved or even pretended to love him. It was her candour which 
 iie felt most keenly. Had she been willing to play the hypocrite, 
 to pretend a little, he would have been ever so much better 
 pleased. To the outside world, even to that narrow world which 
 encircles an old family seat in the depths of the country, Mr. 
 and Mrs. Tregonell appeared a happy couple, whose union was 
 the most natural thing in the world, yet not without a touch of 
 that romance which elevates and idealizes a marriage. 
 
 Were they not brought up under the same roof, boy and girl 
 together, like, and yet not like, brother and sister. How inevit- 
 able that they must become devotedly attached. That little 
 episode of Christabel's engagement to another man counted for 
 nothing. She was so young — had never questioned her own 
 heart. Her true love was away — and she was nattered by the 
 attention of a man of the world like Angus Hamleigh — and so, and 
 so — almost unawares, perhaps, she allowed herself to be engaged
 
 - And Pale from the Past we draw nigh Thee.' ISO 
 
 to him, little knowing the real bent of Lis character and the 
 gulf into which she was about to plunge : for in the neighbour- 
 hood of Mount Royal it was believed that a man who had once 
 Lived as Mr. Hamleigh had lived was a soul lost for ever, a 
 creature given over to ruin in this world and the next. There 
 was no hopef ulness in the local mind for the aftei career of such 
 in offend or. 
 
 At this autumn season, when Mount Royal was filled with 
 visitors, all intent upon taking life pleasantly, it would have been 
 impossible "or a life to seem more prosperous and happy to the 
 outward eye than that of Christabel Tregonell. The centre of 
 a. friendly circle, the ornament of a picturesque and perfectly 
 appointed house, the mother of a lovely boy whom she worship- 
 ped, with the overweening love of a young mother for her firstW *. 
 admired, beloved by all her little world, with a husband who 
 was proud of her and indulgent to her — who could deny that 
 Mrs. Tregonell was a person to be envied. 
 
 Mrs. Fairfax Torringtou, a widow, with a troublesome son, 
 pjnd a mnited income — an income whose narrow boundary sii» 
 was continually overstepping — told her hostess as much one 
 morniug when the men were all out on the hills in the rain, and 
 the women made a wide circle round the library fire, some of 
 them intent upon crewel work, others not even pretending to be 
 industrious, the faithful Randie lying at his mistress's feet, as she 
 sat in her favourite chair by the old carved chimney-piece — the 
 chair which had been her aunt Diana's for so many peaceful years. 
 
 'There is a calmness — an assured tranquility about your life 
 which makes me hideously envious,' said Mrs. Fail fax Torrington, 
 waving the Society paper which she had been using as a screen 
 against the fire, after having read the raciest of its paragraphs 
 aloud, and pretended to be sorry for the dear friends at whom 
 the censor's airy shafts were aimed. 'I have stayed with 
 duchesses and with millionaires — but I never envied either. 
 The duchess is always dragged to death by the innumerable 
 claims upon her time, her money, and her atttention. Her life 
 is very little better than the fate of that unfortunate person 
 who stabbed one of the French Kings — forty wild horses pulling 
 forty different ways. It doesn't make it much better because 
 the horses are called by pretty names, don't you know. Conn. 
 friends, flower-shows, balls, church, opera, Ascot, fancy fairs, 
 seat in Scotland, place in Yorkshire, Baden, Monaco. It 
 is the pull that wears one out, the dreadful longing to be allowed 
 to sit in one's own room by one's own fire, and rest. I know 
 what it is in my small way, so I have always rather pitied 
 duchesses. At a millionaire's house one is inevitably bored. 
 There is an insufferable glare and glitter of money in evt. ia thing, 
 unpleasantly accentuated by an occasional blot of absolute uieap-
 
 tOO Mount Boyal. 
 
 uess. No, Mrs. Tregonell,' pursued the agreeable rattle, I don't 
 envy duchesses or millionaires' wives : but your existence seems 
 to me utterly enviable, so tranquil and easy a life, in such a per- 
 fect hoxse, with the ability to take a plunge into the London 
 vortex whenever you like, or to stay at home if you prefer it, a 
 charming husband, and an ideal baby, and above all that sweet 
 equable temperament of yours, which would make life easy under 
 much harder circumstances. Don't you agree with me, now, 
 Miss Bridgeman?' 
 
 ' I always agree with clever people,' answered Jessie, calmly. 
 
 Christabel went on with her work, a quiet smile upon her 
 beautiful lips. 
 
 Mrs. Torrington was one of those gushing persons to whom 
 there was no higher bliss, after eating and drinking, than the 
 indulgence in that lively monologue which she called conver- 
 sation, and a happy facility for which rendered her, in her own 
 opinion, an acquisition in any country-house. 
 
 ' The general rur* a t people are so dull,' she would remark in 
 ner confidential moments ; ' there are so few who can talk, 
 without being disgustingly egotistical. Most people's idea of 
 conversation is autobiography in instalments. I have always 
 been liked for my high spirits and flow of conversation.' 
 
 High spirits at forty-five are apt to pall, unless accompanied 
 by the rare gift of wit. Mrs. Torrington was not witty, but 
 she had read a good deal of light literature, kept a common- 
 place book, and had gone through life believing herself a 
 Sheridan or a Sidney Smith, in petticoats. 
 
 'A woman's wit is like dancing in fetters,' she complained 
 sometimes : ' there are so many things one must not say ! ' 
 
 Christabel was more than content that her acquaintance 
 should envy her. She wished to be thought happy. She had 
 never for a moment posed as victim or martyr. In good faith, 
 and with steady purpose of well-doing, she had taken upon 
 herself the duties of a wife, and she meant to fulfil them to the 
 uttermost. 
 
 'There shall be no shortcoming on my side,' she said to 
 herself. ' If we cannot live peaceably and happily together it 
 shall not be my fault. If Leonard will not let me respect him 
 as a husband, I can still honour him as my boy's father.' 
 
 In these days of fashionable agnosticism and hysterical devo- 
 tion — when there is hardly any middle path between life spent 
 in church and church-work and the open avowal of unbelief 
 — something must be said in favour of that old-fashioned sober 
 religious feeling which enabled Christabel Tregonell to walk 
 steadfastly along the difficult way, her mind possessed with the 
 ever-present belief in a Righteous Judge who saw all her acta 
 and knew all her thoughts.
 
 ' And Pale from the Past we draw nigh Thee. 1 191 
 
 She studied her husband's pleasure in all things — yielding to 
 him unon every point in which principle was not at stake. The 
 house 'was full of friends of his choosing — not one among 
 those guests, in spite of their surface pleasantness, being 
 congenial to a mind so simple and unworldly, so straight and 
 thorough, as that of Christabel Tregonell. Without Jessie 
 Bridgeman, Mrs. Tregonell would have been companionless in a 
 house full of people. The vivacious widow, the slangy young 
 ladies, with a marked taste for billiards and shooting parties, and 
 an undisguised preference for masculine society, thought their 
 hostess behind the age. It was obvious that she was better 
 informed than they, had been more carefully educated, played 
 better, sang better, was more elegant and refined in every 
 tlu night, and look, and gesture ; but in spite of [all these advau- 
 s, or perhaps on account of them, she was ' slow : ' not 
 an easy person to get on with. Her gowns were simply perfect 
 — but she had no chic. Kous autres, with ever so much less 
 money to spend on our toilettes, look more striking — stand out 
 better from the ruck. An artificial rose here — a rag of old 
 lace — a fan — a vivid ribbon in the maze of our hair — and the 
 effect catches every eye — while poor Mrs. Tregonell, with her 
 lovely complexion, and a gown that is obviously Parisian, is 
 comparatively nowhere. 
 
 This is what the Miss Vandeleurs — old campaigners — 
 told each other as they dressed for dinner, on the 
 second day after their arrival at Mount Boyal. Captain 
 Vandeleur — otherwise Poker Vandeleur, from a supposed 
 natural genius for that intellectual game — was Mr. Tregonell's 
 old friend and travelling companion. They had shared _ a 
 good deal of sport, and not a little hardship in the Eockics 
 — had fished, and shot, and tobogganed in Canada — had played 
 euchre in San Francisco, and monte in Mexico — and, in a 
 word, were bound together by memories and tastes in common. 
 Captain Vandeleur, like Byron's Corsair, had one virtue amidst 
 many shortcomings. He was an affectionate brother, always 
 glad to do a good turn to his sisters — who lived with a shabby 
 i-ld half-pay father, in one of the shabbiest streets in the debat- 
 able land between Pimlico and Chelsea— by courtesy, South 
 Eelgravia. Captain Vandeleur rarely had it in his power to do 
 much for his sisters himself— a five-pound note at Christmas or a 
 bonnet at Midsummer was perhaps the furthest stretch of his 
 personal benevolence — but he was piously fraternal in his readi- 
 ness to victimize his dearest friend for the benefit of Popsy and 
 Mopsy— these being the poetic pet names devised to mitigate 
 the dignity of the baptismal Adolphine and Margaret. When 
 Jack Vandeleur had a pigeon to pluck, he always contrived thai 
 1 k>psy and Mopsy should get a few of <&r feathers. He did not
 
 192 Mount Boyal. 
 
 take his friends home to the shabby little ten-roonied house in 
 South Belgravia — such a nest would have too obviously indicated 
 his affinity to the hawk tribe — but he devised some means of 
 bringing Mopsy and Dopsy and his married friends together. 
 A box at the Opera— stalls for the last burlesque — a drag foi 
 Epsom or Ascot — or even afternoon tea at Hurlingham— and the 
 thing was done. The Miss Vandeleurs never failed to improve 
 the occasion. They had a genius for making their little wants 
 known, and getting them supplied. The number of their gloves— 
 the only shop in London at which wearable gloves could be 
 bought— how naively these favourite themes for girlisli inverse 
 dropped from their cherry Upe. Sunshades, fans, lace, flowers, 
 perfumery — all these luxuries of the toilet were for the most part 
 supplied to Dopsy and Mopsy from this fortuitous source. 
 
 Some pigeons lent themselves more kindly to the plucking 
 than others ; and the Miss Vandeleurs had long ago discovered 
 that it was not the wealthiest men who were most lavish. Given 
 a gentleman with a settled estate of fourteen thousand a year, 
 and the probabilities were that he would not rise above a dozen 
 gloves or a couple of bouquets. It was the simple youth who had 
 just come into five or ten thousand, and had nothing but the 
 workhouse ahead of him when that was gone, who spent his 
 money most freely. It is only the man who is steadfastly iiitoira 
 upon ruining himself, who ever quite comes up to the feirinios 
 idea of generosity. The spendthrift, during his brief season of 
 fortune, leads a charmed life. For him it is hardly a question 
 whether gloves cost five or ten shillings a pair — whether stepha- 
 notis is in or out of season. He offers his tribute to beauty 
 without any base scruples of economy. What does it matter to 
 him whether ruin comes a few months earlier by reason of this 
 lavish liberality, seeing that the ultimate result is inevitable. 
 
 With the Miss Vandeleurs Leonard Tregonell ranked as an 
 old friend. They had met him at theatres and races ; they had 
 been invited to little dinners at which he was host. Jack Van- 
 deleur had a special genius for ordering a dinner, and for acting 
 as guide to a man who liked dining in the highways and byways 
 of London ; it being an understood thing that Captain Vande- 
 leur's professional position as counsellor exempted him for any 
 share in the reckoning. Under his fraternal protection, Dopsy 
 and Mopsy had dined snugly in all manner of foreign restaurants, 
 and had eaten and drunk their fill at Mr. TregonelPs expense. 
 They were both gourmands, and they were not ashamed ot 
 enjoying the pleasures of the table. It seemed to them that the 
 class of men who could not endure to see a woman eat had de- 
 parted with Byron, and Bulwer, and D'Orsay, and De Musset. A 
 new race had arisen, which likes a ' jolly ' gill who can appreciate a 
 recherchd dinner, and knows th» 'Worence between good and bad 
 wine.
 
 'And Pale from the Past we draw nigh Thee.' 103 
 
 Mir. Tregonell did not yield himself up a victim to the fasci- 
 nations of either Dopsy or Mopsy. He had seen too much of 
 that class of beauty during his London experiences, to be caught 
 by the auricomous tangles of one or the flaxen fringe of the 
 other. He talked of them to their brother as nice girls, with no 
 nonsense about them ; he gave them gloves, and dinners, and 
 stalls for ' Madame Angot ; ' but his appreciation took no higher 
 form. 
 
 ' It would have been a fine thing for one of you if you could 
 Lave hooked him,' said their brother, as he smoked a final pipe, 
 between midnight and morning, in the untidy little drawing* 
 
 in in South Belgravia, after an evening with Chaumont. 
 He's a heavy swell in Cornwall, I can tell you. Plenty of 
 money — fine old place. But there's a girl down there he's sweet 
 upon — a cousin. He's very close ; but I caught him kissing and 
 crying over her photograph one night in the Rockies — when our 
 rations had run short, and two of our horses gone dead, and our 
 best guide was down with ague, and there was an idea that we'd 
 lost our track, and should never see England again. That's the 
 only time I ever saw Tregonell sentimental. " I'm not afraid of 
 death,'"' he said, " but I should like to live to see home again, for 
 her sake ; " and he showed me the photo — a sweet, fresh, young 
 face, smiling at us with a look of home and home-afl'ection, and 
 we poor beggars not knowing if we she should ever see a woman's 
 face again. 
 
 ' If you knew he was in love with his cousin, what's the use of 
 talking about his marryingus?' asked Mopsy petulantly, speaking 
 of herself and her sister as if they were a firm. 
 
 1 Oh, there's no knowing, answered Jack, coolly as he puffed 
 at his meerschaum. ' A man may change his mind. Girls with 
 your experience ought to be able to twist a fellow round your 
 Little finger. But tnough you're deuced keen at getting things 
 out of men, you're uncommonly slow at bringing down your bird.' 
 
 ' Look at our surroundings,' said Dopsy bitterly. ' Could we 
 ever dare to bring a man here ; and it is in her own home that a 
 man gets fond of a girL' 
 
 ' Well, a fellow would have to be very far gone to stand this,' 
 ( laptain Yandeleur admitted, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he 
 glanced round the room, with its blotchy paper, and smoky 
 ceiling, its tawdry chandelier, and dilapidated furniture, flabby 
 faded covers to chairs and sofa, side-table piled with shabby books 
 and accumulated newspapers, the half-pay father's canes and 
 umbrellas in the corner, his ancient slippers by the fender, his 
 easy-chair, with its morocco cove indented with the greasy 
 imprint of his venerable shoulders, and over all the rank odour* 
 of yesterday's dinner and stale tobacco-smoke 
 
 • A man in the last stage of spooninesa will stand anything — 
 
 o
 
 194 Mount Boyal. 
 
 you remember the opening chapter of " "Wilhelm Meister ? " said 
 Captain Jack, meditatively — ' but he'd need be very far gone to 
 stand this,' he repeated, with conviction- 
 Six months after this conversation, Mopsy read to Dopsy the 
 announcement of Mr. Tregonell's marriage with the Cornish cousin. 
 
 ' We shall never see any more of him, you may depend,' said 
 Dopsy, with the air of pronouncing an elegy on the ingratitude 
 of man. But she was wrong, for two years later Leonard 
 Tregonell was knocking about town again, in the height of the 
 season, with Poker Vandeleur, and the course of his diversions 
 included a little dinner given to Dopsy and Mopsy at a choice 
 Italian restaurateur's not very far from South Belgravia. 
 
 They both made themselves as agreeable as in them lay. He 
 was married. All matrimonial hopes in that quarter were 
 blighted. But marriage need not prevent his giving them dinners 
 and stalls for the play, or being a serviceable friend to their 
 brother. 
 
 ' Poor Jack's friends are his only reliable income/ said Mopsy. 
 ' He had need hold them fast.' 
 
 Mopsy put on her lively Madame Chaumont manner, and 
 tried to amuse the Benedict. Dopsy was graver, and talked to 
 him about his wife. 
 
 ' She must be very sweet,' she said, 'from Jack's account of her.' 
 
 ' Why, he's never seen her,' exclaimed Mr. Tregonell, looking 
 puzzled. 
 
 ' No ; but you showed him her photograph once in the 
 Rockies. Jack never forgot it.' 
 
 Leonard was pleased at this tribute to his good taste. 
 
 ' She's the loveliest woman I ever saw, though she is my wife, 
 he said ; 'and I'm not ashamed to say I think so.' 
 
 ' How I should like to know her,' sighed Dopsy ; ' but I'm 
 afraid she seldom comes to London.' 
 
 ' That makes no difference,' answered Leonard, warmed into 
 exceptional good humour by the soft influences of Italian cookery 
 and Italian wines. ' Why should not you both come to Mount 
 Royal ? I want Jack to come for the shooting. He can bring 
 you, and you'll be able to amuse my wife, while he and I are 
 out on the hi Us.' 
 
 ' It would be quite too lovely, and we should like it of all 
 things ; but do you think Mrs. Tregonell would be to get on 
 with us 1 ' asked Dopsy, diffidently. 
 
 It was not often she and her sister were asked t j country 
 houses. They were both fluttered at the idea, and turned their 
 thoughts hxward for a mental review of their wardrobe 
 
 'We could do it,' decided Mopsy, 'with a little help from 
 Jack.' 
 
 Nothing more was snid about the visit that nitrht, but o
 
 • And Pale from tlie Past ive draw nigh Thee.' 195 
 
 month later, when Leonard bad gone back to Mount Royal, a 
 courteous letter from Mrs. Tregouell to Miss Vandeleur con- 
 firmed the Squire's invitation, and the two set out for the West 
 of England under their brother's wing, rejoicing at this stroke 
 of good luck. Christabel had been told that they were nice girls, 
 just the kind of girls to be useful in a country-house — girls who 
 Lad very few opportunities of enjoying life, and to whom any 
 kindness would be charity — and she bad done her husband's 
 bidding without an objection of any kind. But when the two 
 damsels appeared at Mount Royal tightly sheathed in sage-green 
 merino, with limp little capes on their shoulders, and picturesque 
 hats upon picturesque heads of hah, Mrs. TregonelTs heart 
 failed her at the idea of a month spent in such company. With- 
 out caring a straw for art, without knowing more of modern 
 poetry than the names of the poets and the covers of their books, 
 Mopsy and Dopsy had been shrewd enough to discover that for 
 young women with narrow means the aesthetic style of dress was 
 by far the safest fashion. Stuff might do duty for silk — a *"•"- 
 flower, if it were only big enough, might make as starting an 
 eii'eet as a blaze of diamonds — a rag of limp tulle or muslin serve 
 instead of costly lace— hair worn after the ideal suffice instead 
 >f expensive headgear, aud home dressmaking pass curreut for 
 originality. Christabel speedily found, however, that these 
 damsels were not exacting in the matter of attention from her- 
 self. So long as they were allowed to be with the men they 
 were happy. In the billiard-room, or the tennis-court, in the 
 old Tudor hall, which was Leonard's favourite tabagie, in the 
 saddle-room, or the stable-yard, on the hills, or on the sea, wher- 
 ever the men woidd sufl'er their presence, Dopsy and Mopsy 
 were charmed to be. On those rare occasions when the out-of- 
 door party was made up without them they sat about the drawing- 
 room in hopeless, helpless idleness — turning over yesterday's 
 London papers, or stumbling through German waltzes on the 
 iron-framed Kirkman grand, which had been Leonard's birthday 
 gift to his wife. At their worst the Miss Vandeleurs gave 
 Christabel very little trouble, for they felt curiously shy in her 
 society. She was not of their world. They had not one thought 
 or one taste in common. Mrs. Torrington, who insisted upon 
 taking her hostess under her whiff, was a much more troublesome 
 
 Iieraon. The Vandeleur girls helped to amuse Leonard, who 
 aughed at their slang and their mannishness, and who liked the 
 sound of girlish voices in the house — albeit those voices were 
 loud and vulgar. They made themselves particular] <f agreeable 
 to Jessie Bridgenian, who declared that she took the keenest 
 interest in them — as natural curiosities. 
 
 1 Why should we pore over moths and zoophytes, and puzzle 
 our brains with long Greek and Latin names, demanded Jessie,
 
 196 Mount Boyal, 
 
 1 wheit our own species affords an inexhaustible variety of crea- 
 tures, all infinitely interesting 1 These Vandeleur girls are as 
 new to me as if they had dropped from Mars or Saturn.' 
 
 Life, therefore, to ah outward seeming, went very pleasantly 
 at Mount Royal. A perfectly appointed house in which money 
 is spent lavishly can hardly fail to be agreeable to those casual 
 inmates who have nothing to do with its maintenance. To Dopsy 
 and Mopsy Moimt Royal was a terrestrial paradise. They had 
 never imagined an existence so entirely blissful. This perfumed 
 atmosphere — this unfailing procession of luxurious meals — no 
 cold mutton to hang on hand — no beggarly mutation from bacon 
 to bloater and bloater to bacon at breakfast-time — no wolf at the 
 door. 
 
 ' To think that money can make all this difference,' exclaimed 
 Mopsy, as she sat with Dopsy on a heather-covered knoll waiting 
 for the shooters to join them at luncheon, while the servants 
 grouped themselves respectfully a little way oft* with the break 
 and horses. 'Won't it be too dreadful to have to go home 
 again % ' 
 
 ' Loathsome ! ' said Dopsy, whose conversational strength con- 
 sisted in the liberal use of about half-a-dozen vigorous epithets. 
 
 ' I wish there were some rich young men staying here, that 
 one might get a chance of promotion.' 
 
 'Rich men never marry poor girls,' answered Mopsy, de- 
 jectedly, ' unless the girl is a famous beauty or a favourite 
 actress. You and I are nothing. Heaven only knows what is tc 
 become of us when the pater dies. Jack will never be able to 
 give us free quarters. We shall have to go out as shop girls. 
 We're a great deal too ignorant for governesses.' 
 
 ' I shall go on the stage,' said Dopsy, with decision. ' I may 
 not be handsome — but I can sing in tune, and my feet and ankles 
 have always been my strong point. All the rest is leather and 
 prunella, as Shakespeare says.' 
 
 ' I shall engage myself to Spiers and Pond,' said Mopsy. ' It 
 must be a more lively life, and doesn't require either voice or 
 ankles — which I '■ — rather vindictively — ' do not possess. Of 
 course Jack won't like it — but I can't help that.' 
 
 Thus, in the face of all that is loveliest and most poetical in 
 Nature — the dreamy moorland — the distant sea — the Lion-rock 
 with the afternoon sunshine on it — the blue boundless sky — and 
 one far-away sail, silvered with light, standing out against the 
 low dark line of Lundy Island — debated Mopsy and Dopsy, 
 waiting with keen appetites for the game pasty, and the welcome 
 bottle or two of Moet, which they were to share with the sports- 
 men. 
 
 While these damsels thus beguiled the autumn afternoon, 
 Christabel and d'essie had sallied out alone for one of their oW
 
 * And Pale from the Past we draw nigh TJicc* 197 
 
 rambles ; such a solitary walk as had been their delight in t lie 
 careless long ago, before ever passionate love, and sorrow, his 
 handmaiden, came to Mount Royal. 
 
 Mrs. Torrington and three other guests had left that morning ; 
 the Vandeleurs, and Reginald Montagu, a free and easy little 
 War-office clerk, were now the only visitors at Mount Royal, 
 and Mrs. Tregonell was free to lead her own life — so with Jessie 
 and Rindie for company, she started at noontide for Tintagel. 
 She could never weary of the walk by the cliffs — or even of the 
 quiet country road with its blossoming hedgerows and boundless 
 outlook. Every step of the way, every tint on field or meadow, 
 every change in sky and sea was familiar to her, but she loved 
 them all. 
 
 They had loitered in their ramble by the cliffs, talking a good 
 deal of the past, for Jessie was now the only listener to whom 
 Christabel could freely open her heart, and she loved to talk with 
 her of the days that were gone, and of her first lover. Of their 
 love and of their parting she never spoke — to talk of those things 
 might have seemed treason in the wetlded wife — but she loved to 
 talk of the man himself — of his opinions, his ideas, the stories 
 he had told them in their many rambles — his creed, his dreams 
 — speaking of him always as ' Mr. Hamleigh,' and just as she 
 might have spoken of any clever and intimate friend, lost to 
 her, through adverse circumstance, for ever. It is hardly likely, 
 dince they talked of him so often when they were alone ; that 
 they spoke of him more on this day than usual : but it seemed 
 bo them afterwards as if they had done so — and as if their con- 
 versation in somewise forecast that which was to happen before 
 yonder sun had dipped behind the wave. 
 
 They climbed the castle hill, and seated themselves on a low 
 fragment of wall with their faces seaward. There was a lovely 
 light on the sea, scarcely a breath of wind to curl the edges of 
 the long waves which rolled slowly in and slid over the dark 
 rocks in shining slabs of emerald-tinted water. Here and there 
 d2ep purple patches showed where the sea-weed grew thickest, 
 and here and there the dark outline of a convocation of shags 
 stood out sharply above the crest of a rock. 
 
 ' It was on just such a day that we first brought Mr. 
 □araleigh to this place,' said Christabel. 
 
 ' Yes, our Cornish autumns are almost always lovely, and this 
 year the weather is particularly mild,' answered Jessie, in her 
 matter-of-fact way. She always put on this air when she saw 
 Chr'stabel drifting into dangerous feeling. 'I shouldn't wonder 
 if we were to have a second crop of strawberries this year.' 
 
 ' IX /o*u remember how we talked of Tristan and Iseulfc— » 
 poor Iseult V 
 
 ' To or Marc, I think.'
 
 198 Mount Boyal. 
 
 1 Marc ? One can't pity him. He was an ingrate and a 
 
 coward.' 
 
 ' He was a man and a husband,' retorted Jessie ; ' and he 
 seems to have been badly treated all round.' 
 
 ' Whither does he wander now ? ' said Christabel, softly 
 repeating lines learnt long ago. 
 
 ' Haply in his dreams the wind 
 Wafts him here and lets him find 
 The lovely orphan child again, 
 
 In her castle by the coast ; 
 The youngest fairest chatelaine, 
 
 That this realm of Franco can boast, 
 Our snowdrop by the Atlantic sea, 
 Iseult of Brittany.' 
 
 ' Poor Iseult of the White Hand,' said a voice at Christabel'a 
 shoulder, ' after all was not her lot the saddest— had not she the 
 best claim to our pity 1 ' 
 
 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'g 
 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, tie 
 throne of Ormuzd, occupies the centre.' 
 
 ' And how do you happen to be here — on this insignificant 
 mound ? ' asked Jessie. 
 
 1 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 1 ' 
 
 ' No, I am stavvjg witr the Vicar of Trevena, He is an old 
 friend of my fatl.b.-d : they were college chums : and Mr. Carlyon 
 'g always kind to me.'
 
 1 And Pale from the Past we draw nigh Thee.' 199 
 
 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 
 ?. 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 Bridge- 
 man. I was going to say that unfortunately for me I hav ■ 
 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 pre- 
 paration 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 
 stri ak of purplish brown or brownish purple with the level strip 
 of land chiefly given over to rabbits. Yet her hevrt was achiii ; 
 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 1 
 
 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 
 
 rt she had broken. 
 
 'Good-bye !' she said, holding outlier hand, and looking at 
 him with calm, grave eyes. ' I am very glad to have seen you 
 n. 1 hope you always think of me as your friend V 
 
 '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. V
 
 200 * Mount Royal. 
 
 He shook hands cordially with Jessie Bridgeman, and they 
 'eft him standing amidst the Tow 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 V 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 V 
 
 1 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, 
 a ngrily. ' Certainly, you are not much like other women. You 
 ire a piece of icy propriety — your love is a kind of milk-and- 
 vatery 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 
 I >oulder four or five feet below. 
 
 •How madly you talk, Jessie. You remind me «f Scott's 
 Fenella — and I believe you are almost as wild a creature,' said 
 ( 'hristabel. 
 
 ' 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 burn, 1 - within him. This dread of one's neighbour — this 
 slavish respect for public opinion — reduces life to mer® mechanism 
 — society to a stage play.'
 
 9 But it Sufliceth, that the Day will End.' 201 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 'BUT IT StJFFICETH, THAT THE DAY WILL END.' 
 
 Citristabel 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 horse- 
 women — 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 Chris- 
 tabel'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 Vande- 
 leurs 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 its rather a pity that all
 
 202 Mount Royal. 
 
 the men staying here have been detrimentals — not one woith 
 catching.' 
 
 ' What does it matter ! ' ejaculated Dopsy. ' If there had 
 been one worth catching, he wouldn't have consented to bo 
 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.' 
 
 'AVell, I'd have had a try for him, anyhow,' said Mopsy, 
 defiantly, leaning her elbow on the dressing-table, and contem- 
 plating 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 1 ' 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.' 
 
 ' Onr 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 yonr 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 silting 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.
 
 'But it Sufliccth, that the Day will End.' 203 
 
 ' What is it ? Please, please tell.' 
 
 ' 1 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 fortnight to shoot woodcock, and to offer his own uncon- 
 scious 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 
 any ai-ricre pens/e,' 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 1 ' she exclaimed. 
 
 ' Why not ? He was out with us to-day. He is a jolly 
 fellow ; rides uncommonly straight, though he dosen'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 cf 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.' 
 
 1 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 
 di e ing for dinner, with a vague recollection of ha ring cultivated 
 her imagination in childhood. She had never done so since that
 
 204) Mount Boyal 
 
 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 adver- 
 tisements 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 V 
 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 trae there 
 was no surprise, no sudden shock, no dear familiar scene, no 
 Bolemn 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 Eoyal — the firelitroom, 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 aesthetic inclination of each towzled head. 
 
 ' I suppose you have not long come from London V murmured 
 Dopsy, determined not to lose a moment. ' Have you seen all 
 the new things at the theatres ? I hope you are an Irvingite V
 
 'But it Sitfficcth, that the Day will End.' 205 
 
 * I regret to say that my religious opinions have not y«t taken 
 that bent. It is a spiritual height which 1 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. 
 
 1 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 be simpatica,' 
 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. Tregoncll 
 won Dopsy's gratitude by asking Mr. Hamleigh to take her 
 into dinner. Mr. Montague gave his arm to Miss Bridgema',i, 
 Leonard took Mopsy, and Christabel followed with Majoi 
 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 werefla ttering 
 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 tojjic likely 
 to cheer and interest his hostess. 
 
 ' I am so glad,' she answered, lighting up at once, and uncon- 
 scious that Angus was trying to see her face under the low lamp- 
 light, 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 is 
 proud of him.' 
 
 'But not quite so fond of him as you are,' replied Major 
 Bree, interpreting her emphasis. ' That is only natural. Infant- 
 olatry is a feminine attribute. Wait till the boy is old enough to 
 go out fishin' and shootin' — ' the Major was too much a gentle- 
 man to pronounce a final g — 'and then see if his father don't 
 dot? upon him.' 
 
 ' I dare say he will be very fond of him then. Eut 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.'
 
 206 Mount Eoyal. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh, with his head gently bent ovei 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 loot 
 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 1 ' ejaculated Mr 
 Hamleigh. 
 
 ' Irving as Shylock ! ' sighed Dopsy. 
 
 'Miss Terry as Portia,' retorted Angus. 
 
 * Unutterably sweet, was she not 1 ' 
 
 '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 V 
 
 ' Pretty is not the word. She is simply divine. Greuze might 
 have piinted her — there is no living painter whose palette holds 
 the tint of those blue eyes.' 
 
 Uopsy 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 a3 
 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
 
 * But it Sufficcth, that tlie Day will End.' 207 
 
 Jack Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu had departed — while Christ- 
 abel played a capriccio by Mendelssohn. Mr. Hainleigh 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 tweeledum 
 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 Mai lame 
 Angot. Yet they gushed and said, ' too delicious — quite too 
 utterly lovely,' when Mrs. TregoneU 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 bad 
 passed so calmly — that her heart — though it had ached at the 
 change in Angu3 Hamleigh's looks, had been in no wise tumul- 
 tuously 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 anu nope. 
 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 
 •ndency. 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 in- 
 different to religion. He was not one of that eminenlly practical 
 ol which, in the words of Matthew Arnold, thinks it more 
 rtaut to learn how buttons and papier-m&che are 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 
 Banie roof as if they were every-day friends { The I eimd 
 
 fraught with danger, impossible for peace. But when sho
 
 208 Mount Royal. 
 
 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 unseltish 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 
 oright 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 gentleman 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 clirysanthemums and scarlet geraniums ; the gentle- 
 men 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 1 ' 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. Hero 
 «va8 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 
 Rindness 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 girb 
 better stay at home 1 The rain will spoil your gowns.' 
 
 ' Our gowns won't hurt,' said Mopsy brightening. ' But do 
 you really think there will be rain 1 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
 
 'But it Svffcetk, that the Day will End' 209 
 
 f,.i bad manners. 'Come Ponto, come Juno, hi Delia,' this to 
 the lovely lemon and white spaniels, fawning upon him with 
 mil! m. 
 
 ' 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 tha 
 art, declaring that he played divinely — in such a quiet style — so 
 '•rv superior to Jack's or Mr. Tregonell's, though both those 
 j i ntlemen 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 tha 
 while how Christabel was spending her morning, and thinking 
 bow 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 aa 
 irmly 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 manuer — 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 
 i hat 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, 
 tentive, had done exactly what she had asked him to do, 
 
 p
 
 210 Mount Royal. 
 
 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 brothei-'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 Eandie, 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 blandish- 
 ments. 
 
 ' 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 witu. Jessie and the dogs. Mr. 
 HnmVeigh was longing to be by her side — to talk as they kad
 
 • But it Sujficeth, that the Day will End.' 211 
 
 talked of old — of a thousand things which could be safely dis- 
 cussed 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 w'th idle ques- 
 tions, and stereotyped remarks, looking at him withlanguishing 
 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 that 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. 
 
 1 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 
 Btacks 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 
 6cullery.' 
 
 From the quarry they strolled across the fields to the high 
 road, and the gate uf the farm which contains wiihinits 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 wifa, 
 and from his wife to Angus Hamleigh, with a keen, quick glance, 
 too swift to be remarkable. ' Uncommonly good of you Wa 
 are going to have a grand year for woodcock, I believe — like the 
 season of 1855, when a farmer of St. Bury an shot firty-fourinoue 
 week.' 
 
 'Poor dear little birds!' sighed Mopsy; 'I feel so sorry for 
 them.'
 
 212 Mount Royal. 
 
 '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 
 cats 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 the demi-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. ADd could it be that 
 one of these meretricious creatures was angling for him — for 
 him, the Lauzun, the d'Eckmiihl, the Prince de Belgioso, of his 
 day — the born dandy, with whum fastidiousness was a sixth 
 sense 1 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. Hamleighaud 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 of chic — plenty of go — savoir faire — and 
 all that kind of thing, don't you know. They're the most com- 
 panionable 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 ore of them.' 
 
 'Hardly !' thought Leonard, 'unless he married both.' 
 
 ' It would be a tine thing for Dop if Mr. Hamleigh were to 
 ome to the scratch/ mused Jack.
 
 'But it Sufficeth, that the Day will End.' 213 
 
 ' I wonder what was Leonard's motive in asking Mr. Ham- 
 leigh to stay at Mount Royal ?' said Christabel, suddenly, after 
 she and Jessie had been talking of different subjects. 
 
 ' I hope he had not any motive, but that the invitation was 
 the impulse of the moment, without rhyme or reason,' answered 
 Mi^s Bridgeman. 
 
 ' WhyV 
 
 ' 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 com- 
 panion — nay, sometimes, quite alone, while Jessie joined the 
 revellers at pool or shell-out. Dopsy and Mopsy could not al- 
 together 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 conver- 
 sationally 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 per- 
 fection 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
 
 214 Mount Royal. 
 
 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 sun- 
 set warm upon his face — who knows himself near the lifting of 
 the veil — the awful, fateful experiment called death. Angus 
 Hamlei<jh 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 gain- 
 sayed by facts. For the last four years he had lived as a man 
 lives who has ceased to value his life. He has 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 with- 
 out 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 no arriere pense'e — no tending towards for- 
 bidden 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 un- 
 worthiness 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
 
 'But it Sufficeth, that the Day will End.' 21 j 
 
 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 Cbristabel 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 
 everybody else ought to dote 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 eveiy 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
 
 216 Mount Eoyal. 
 
 their loveinaking, she was still Christabel. To Jessie, and to 
 none other, could he speak of her with perfect freedom. 
 
 CHAPTEE XX. 
 
 'WHO KNOWS NOT CIRCE?' 
 
 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 al ways with them — veiy 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 aifrightedly, 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 book-shelf 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 
 sesthetic attitude idly plucking up faded heather blossoms with 
 a tightly gloved hand, and wondering whether Mr. E&mlejgh 
 no iced how small the hard %vas. She thought she was going
 
 Wlio knows not Circe ? y 217 
 
 straight to hi9 heart with these naive confessions ; she had 
 always heard that men hated learned women, and no doubt Mr. 
 Hamleigh's habit of prosing f.bout 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 1 i Id 
 his peace. She had contrived to be by Mr. Hamleighs 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.' 
 
 1 1 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.' 
 
 LTe 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 Lad 
 come from his youthful sin, that one fatal turn upon the road of 
 life which he had taken so lightly, tripping with joyous com- 
 panions 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?' lie asked ; 
 *you are always together. I begin to understand why HaQileigh 
 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 hid bearing or discourse should compromise either himself or 
 lh^ '*oung lad \ 
 
 A^V-0 g'oo' te ^ faintly, and looked mudeslly at the heather.
 
 218 Mount Boyal. 
 
 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 elabo- 
 rate air of struggling with the tumult of her feelings. ' Don't 
 you adore him I ' 
 
 ' 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 Tenn) r son 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 with- 
 out a word. 
 
 ' He has not lovable manners has he ? ' inquired Dopsy, with 
 her childish air ; ' but he is so good-hearted.' 
 
 1 No doubt. You have known him some time, haven't you 1 ' 
 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 down- 
 ward in front of them, rocks and water below. And to think 
 that she — his dearest, she, all gentleness and refinement, w;u 
 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.
 
 • H'Au knows not Circe V 210 
 
 Dopsy did not allow him much leisure for mournful medita- 
 tion. 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 resigna- 
 tion, 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, accus- 
 tomed to the free and easy manners of her brother's friends, 
 mistook Mr. Hamleigh's natural courtsey to the sex for particu- 
 lar 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. 
 
 1 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, flash- 
 ing 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 se 
 lected 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 pleasant 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 attraction* 
 — 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 feela
 
 ?2(j Muant Royal. 
 
 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 tea-cup 
 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, naively. ' And now I feel as if I 
 did not care a straw about all the plays that were ever acted 
 — all the actoi's who ever lived. Strange, is it not, that one 
 can change so, in one little fortnight 1 ' 
 
 ' 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 i3 
 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, 3 said Mr. Hamleigh, within himself ; and then he 
 answered, lightly, 
 
 ' Perhaps you have been attending the little chapel at Bos- 
 castle, 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 comprint, 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 dis- 
 tressed. Is there anything on your mind 1 Is there anything 
 that I can do \ Shall I fetch your sister 1 ' 
 
 ' No, no,' gasped Dopsy, in a choked voice. ' Please don't 
 go away. I like you to be near me.' 
 
 She pat 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 hehi She was, Indeed, in her inmost heart, asking him to
 
 l Wlio knows not Circe?' 221 
 
 rescue her from the groat dismal swamp of poverty and ili* 
 repute ; 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. 1 1 e 
 bad parried those light arrows lightly ; but he was painfully 
 embarrassed by this appeal to his compassion. It was a i:ew 
 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 sucV 
 a brother as Poker Vandeleur — and a father to match.' 
 
 While he sat in silent embarrassment, and while Dopsj 
 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 embraaure. 
 
 'What are you two talking about in the dark?' he asked, 
 as Dopsy confusedly shuttled 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'a 
 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, iE the flickering tire-light, 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 ag t an into tears. 
 
 'I am afraid lie 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— pre- 
 
 ids to be <lying of consumption — gives himself no end of airs, 
 lie has flirted outrageously with you. Has he proposed ? ' 
 
 ' No not exactly,' faltered Dopsy. 
 
 ' Some one ought to bring him to the scratch. Your brothel 
 must tackle him.'
 
 222 Mount Boyal. 
 
 ' 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 1 ' 
 
 '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. Tregonell, what a noble heart you have — what a 
 true friend you have always been to us 1 ' 
 
 ' 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 1 ' 
 
 ' 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 1 ' 
 
 ' You are not jealous of him V 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 
 make me jealous.' 
 
 Dopsy felt her hopes in somewise revived by Mr. Tregonell's 
 manner of looking at things. Up to this point she had mis- 
 trusted 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 adjust- 
 ment of the sunflower on her shoulder. 
 
 'How flushed and sha,-y you are,' exclaimed Mopsy, pausing 
 in the pencilling of an eyebrow to look at her sister. ' Is the 
 deed done ? Has he popped 1 ' 
 
 ' No, he has not popped. But I think he will.' 
 
 'I wish I wert, ">f 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 monej
 
 *Wlw knotos not Circe? 1 223 
 
 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 
 (Vilkins" 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 two- 
 pence for him.' 
 
 The Eector 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 Druid ic 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 tine old room, 
 once a chapel, in which there was pace enough for settees, and 
 easy chairs, tea-tables, books, flowers, and dogs, without thft 
 slightest inconvenience to the players. 
 
 ' You'll play, Hamleigh ? ' said Leonard. 
 
 1 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 1 
 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 Cliri tabel's table near him, loaded with 
 hei 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 puttier tie of mutual likings and dislikings 1
 
 224 Mmnt Royal. 
 
 The men all lighted their cigarettes, and the £ame 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 Eandie 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 artfid touch of Indian ink under the 
 lashes, her eyebrows accentual d by the same artistic treatment, 
 her huge 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. 
 
 1 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 
 poacock — surely he is innocent of our woes.' 
 
 ' I have known the most direful calamities follow the intro- 
 duction 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 1 ' 
 
 ' 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 pos 
 sessed 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 V 
 
 ' Not to me. I used to be the most thoughtless happy-go- 
 lucky creature.' 
 
 ' Until when V 
 
 ' Till I came to Cornwall,' with a faint sigh, and a sudden 
 upward glance of a pair of blue eyes which would have been 
 pretty, had they been only innocent of all scheming.
 
 ' JVhn knows not Circe ? ' 225 
 
 1 Then I'm afraid this mixture of sea and mountain air does 
 not agree with you. Too exciting for your nerves perhaps.' 
 
 ' I don't think it is that,' with a still fainter sigh. 
 
 1 Then the peacocks' feathers must be to blame. Why don't 
 you throw your fan into the fire V 
 
 ' Not for worlds,' said Dopsy. 
 
 ' Why not V 
 
 ' First, because it cost a guinea,' naively, ' and then because 
 it is associated with quite the happiest period of my life.' 
 
 ' You said just now you had been unhappy since you owned it.' 
 
 ' Only by fits and starts. Two utterly happy at other times.' 
 
 ' If I say another word she will dissolve into tears again,' 
 thought Angus.; ' I shall have to leave Mount Royal : a man in 
 weak health is no match for a young woman of this type. She 
 will get me into a corner and declare I have proposed to her.' 
 
 He got up and went over to the table, wh«re Mr. Montagu 
 was just finishing the game, with a break which had left Dopsy 
 free for flirtation during the last ten minutes. 
 
 Mr. Hamleigh played in the next game, but this hardly 
 bettered his condition, for Dopsy now took her sister's place with 
 the cue, and required to be instructed as to every stroke, and 
 even to have her fingers placed in position, now and then by 
 Aliens, when the ball was under the cushion, and the stroke in 
 any° way difficult. This lengthened the game, and bored Angus 
 exceedingly, besides making him ridiculous in the eyes of the 
 other three men. 
 
 ' I hate playing with lovers,' muttered Leonard, under his 
 breath, when Dopsy was especially worrying about the exact point 
 at which she w;is to hit the ball for a pari;;?ular cannon. 
 
 'Decidedly I must get away to-morrow,' reflected Angus. 
 
 The game went on"merrily enough, and was only just over 
 when the stable clock struck eleven, at which hour the servants 
 brought in a tray with a tankard of mulled claret for vice, and a 
 siphon for virtue. The Miss Vandeleurs, after pretending to say 
 good-night, were persuaded to sip a little of the hot spiced wine, 
 and were half inclined to accept the cigarettes persuasively 
 oiTered by Mr. Montagu ; till, warned by a wink from Jack, they 
 drew up suddenly, declared they had been quite too awfully 
 dissipated, that they should be too kte to wish Mrs. Tregonell 
 good-night, and skipped away. 
 
 1 Awfully jolly girls, those sisters of yours,' said Montagu, as 
 he closed the door which he had opened for the damsels' exit, and 
 stroll, d back to the hearth, where Angus was sitting dreamily 
 caressing Randie— her dog ! How many a happy dog has 
 i ed caresses charged with the love of his mistress, such 
 i . rnful kisses as Dido lavished on the young Aaainiaa in t.h* 
 dead watches of the weary night 
 
 o
 
 226 Mount Royal. 
 
 Jack Vandeleur and his host had begun another gains, 
 delighted at having the table to themselves. 
 
 ' Yes, they're nice girls,' answered Mr. Vandeleur, without 
 looking off the table ; ' just the right kind of girls for a country- 
 house : no starch, no prudishness, but as innocent as babies, and 
 as true-hearted — well, they are all heart I should be sorry to 
 see anybody trifle with either of them. Tt would be a very 
 serious thing for her — and it should be my business to make 
 it serious for him.' 
 
 ' Great advantage for a girl to have a brother who enjoys the 
 reputation of being a dead shot,' said Mr. Montagu, ' or it would 
 be if duelling wer» not an exploded institution — like trial for 
 witchcraft, and hanging for petty larceny.' 
 
 ' Duelling is never out of fashion, among gentlemen,' answered 
 Jack, making a cannon and going in off the red. ' That makes 
 seventeen, Monty. There are injuries which nothing but the 
 pistol can redress, and I'm not sorry that my Eed River ex- 
 perience has made me a pretty good shot. But I'm not half ae 
 good as Leonard. He could give me fifty in a hundred any 
 day.' 
 
 1 When a man has to keep his party in butcher's meat by the 
 use of his rifle, he'i need be a decent marksman,' answered Mr. 
 Tregonell, carelessly. ' I never knew the right use of a gun till 
 I crossed the Rockies. By-the-way, who is for woodcock shooting 
 to-morrow ? You'll come, I suppose, Jack 1 ' 
 
 * Not to-morrow, thanks. Monty and I are going over to 
 Bodmin to see a man hanged. We've got an order to view, aa 
 the house-agents call it. Monty is supposed to be on the Times. 
 I go for the Western Daily Mercury.'' 
 
 'What a horrid ghoulish thing to do,' said Leonard. 
 
 ' It's seeing life,' answered Jack, shrugging his shoulders. 
 
 ' I should call it the other thing. However, as crime is very 
 rare in Cornwall, you may as well make the most of your 
 opportunity. But it's a pity to neglect the birds. This is one 
 of the best seasons we've had since 1860, when there wa.s a 
 remarkable flight of birds in the second week in October. But 
 even that year wasn't as good as '55, when]a farmer at St. Buryan 
 killed close upon sixty birds in a week. You'll go to-morrow, 
 I hope, Mr. Hamlcigh ? There's some very good ground about 
 St. Nectan's Kieve, and it's a picturesque sort of place, that will 
 just hit your fancy.' 
 
 ' I have been to the Kieve, often — yes, it is a lovely spot,' 
 answered Angus, remembering his first visit to Mount Royal, 
 and the golden afternoons which he had spent with Christabel 
 among tiio rocks and the ferns, then- low voices half drowned by 
 the noire of the waterfall. ' But I shan't be able to shoot to- 
 morrow. I have just been making up my mind to tear myself
 
 • Wlw knows not Circe V 227 
 
 away from Mount Royal, and I was going to ask you to let one 
 of your grooms drive me over to Launceston in time for the 
 mit! -day train. I can get up from Plymouth by the Limited 
 Mail.' 
 
 ' Why are you in such a hurry V asked Leonard. ' I thought 
 you were rather enjoying yourself with us.' 
 
 ' So much so that as far as my own inclination goes there is 
 no reason why I should not stay here for the rest of my life — 
 only you would get tired of me — and I have promised my doctor 
 to go southward before the frosty weather begins.' 
 
 ' A day or two can't make much difference.' 
 
 ' Not much — only when there is a disagreeable effort to be 
 made the sooner one gets it over the better.' 
 
 ' 1 am sorry you are off so suddenly,' said Leonard, going on 
 with the game, and looking rather oddly across the table at 
 Captain Vandeleur. 
 
 ' I am more than sorry,' said that gentleman, ' I am surprised. 
 But perhaps I am not altogether in the secret of your move- 
 ments.' 
 
 ' There is no secret,' said Angus. 
 
 ' Isn't there ? Then I'm considerably mistaken. It has 
 looked very much lately as if there were a particular understand- 
 ing between you and my elder sister ; and I think, as her 
 brother, I have some right to be let into the secret before you 
 leave Mount Royal.' 
 
 'I am sorry that either my manner, or Miss Vandeleur'a, 
 should have so far misled you,' answered Angus, with freezing: 
 gravity He pitied the sister, but felt only cold contempt for the 
 brother. 'The young lady and I have never interchanged a 
 word which might not have been heard by everybody at Mount 
 jJoyal.' 
 
 ' And you have had no serious intentions — you have never 
 pretended to any serious feeling about her'?' 
 
 ' Never. Charming as the young lady may be, I have been, 
 and am, adamant against all such fascinations. A man who has 
 been told that he may not live a year is hardly in a position to 
 make an offer of marriage. Good-night, Tregonell. I shall rely 
 on your letting one of your men drive me to the station.' 
 
 He nodded good-night to the other two men, and left the room. 
 Lie, who loved him for the sake of old times, followed at his 
 heels. 
 
 'There goes a cur who deserves a dose cf cold lead,' said 
 lookh » vindictivi ly towards the door. 
 
 'What, Randie, my wife's favour;! 
 
 'No, the two-legged cur. Come, you two men know how 
 outrageously that puppy has flirted with my sister.' 
 
 ' I know there has been — some kind of flirtation,' answered
 
 228 Mount Boy at. 
 
 Mr. Montagu, luxuriously buried in a large arm-chair, with hia 
 legs hanging over the arm, ' and I suppose it's the man who's to 
 blame. Of course it always is the man.' 
 
 'Did you ever hear such a sneaking evasion V demandej) 
 Jack, ' Not a year to live forsooth. Why if he can't make her 
 his wife he is bound as a gentleman to make her his widow.' 
 
 ' He has plenty of coin, hasn't he V asked Montagu. ' Your 
 sister 1.;..- never gone for me — and I'm dreadfully soft under such 
 treatment. When I think of the number of girls I've proposed 
 to, and how gracefully I've always backed out of it afterwards, I 
 really wonder at my own audacity. I never refuse to marry the 
 lady — -pas si bete : " I adore you, and we'll be married to-morrow 
 if you like," I say. " But you'll have to live with your papa and 
 mamma for the first ten years. Perhaps by that time I might 
 be able to take second-floor lodgings in Bloomsbury, and we 
 could begin housekeeping." ' 
 
 ' You're a privileged pauper,' said Captain Yandeleur ; 'Mr. 
 Hamleigh is quite another kind of individual — and I say that 
 he has behaved in a dastardly manner to my elder sister. 
 Everybody in this house thought that he was in love with her.' 
 
 ' You have told us so several times.' answered Montagu, 
 coolly, 'and we're bound to believe you, don't you know,' 
 
 ' I should have thought you'd have had too much spunk 
 to see an old friend's sister jilted in such a barefaced way, 
 Tregonell,' said Jack Yandeleur, who had drunk just enough 
 to make him quarrelsome. 
 
 'You don't mean to say that i am accountable for his 
 actions, do you]' retorted Leonard. 'That's rather a large 
 order.' 
 
 ' I mean to say that you asked him here — and you puffed 
 him oil' as a great catch — and half turned poor little Dop'a 
 head by your talk about him. If you knew what an arrant 
 flirt he was you oughtn't to have brought him inside yoiu 
 doors.' 
 
 ' Perhaps I didn't know anything about it,' answered Leonard, 
 wit! i Ins most exasperating air. 
 
 ' Then I can only say that if half I've heard is true you 
 ought to have known all about it.' 
 
 ' As how 1 ' 
 
 'Because it is common club-talk that he flirted with your 
 wife — was engaged to her — and was thrown off by her on 
 account of his extremely disreputable antecedents. Your mother 
 has the sole credit of the throwing off, by-the-by.' 
 
 ' You had better leave my mother's name and my wife's 
 name out of your conversation. That's twenty-eight to me, 
 Monty. Poker has spoiled a capital break by hia d — — <j 
 personality.'
 
 'And Time is Setting tvi' Me, 0.' 229 
 
 ' I beg your pardon — Mrs. Tregonell is simply perfect, and 
 there is no woman I more deeply Jionour. But still you must 
 allow me to wonder that you ever let that man cross your 
 threshold.' 
 
 ' You are welcome to go on wondering. It's a wholesome 
 exercise for a sluggish brain.' 
 
 ' Game,' exclaimed Mr. Montague ; and Leonard put his 
 cue in the rack, and walked away, without another word to 
 either of his guests. 
 
 'lie's a dreadful bear,' said little Monty, emptying the 
 tankard ; ' but you oughtn't to have talked about the wife, 
 Poker — that was bad form.' 
 
 ' Does he ever study good form when he talks of my 
 people ? He had no business to bring that fine gentleman here 
 to flirt with my sister.' 
 
 1 But really now, don't you think your sister did her share 
 of the flitting, and that she's rather an old hand at that kind 
 of thing? I adore Dop and Mop, as I'm sure you know, and 
 I only wish I were rich enough to back my opinion by 
 marrying one of them — but I don't think our dear little Dopsy 
 is the kind of girl to break her heart about any man — more 
 especially a sentimental duffer with hollow cheeks and a hollow 
 cough.' 
 
 CHAPTEB XXI. 
 
 'and time is setting wi' me, o.' 
 
 Angus Hamleigii left the billiard players with the intention of 
 going straight to his own room ; but in the hall he encounten d 
 the Bector of Trevalga, who was just going away, very 
 apologetic at having stayed so late, beguiled by the fascination 
 of antiquarian talk. Christabel and Jessie had come out to 
 the hall, to bid their old friends good-night, and thus it 
 happened that Mr. Hamleigh went back to the drawing-room, 
 and sat there talking till nearly midnight. They sat in front 
 of the dying fire, talking as they had talked in days gone by — 
 and their conversation grew sad and solemn as the hour wore 
 on. Angus announced his intended departure, and Christabel 
 nad no word to say against his decision. 
 
 ' We shall be very sorry to lose you,' she said, sheltering 
 her personality behind the plural pronoun, 'but I think it 
 is wise of you to waste no more time.' 
 
 ' I have not wasted an hour. It has been unspeakable 
 happiness for me to be here — and I am more grateful than I
 
 230 Mount Eoyal. 
 
 can say to jour husband for having brought me here — for having 
 treated me with such frank cordiality. The time has come when 
 I may speak very freely — yes — a man whose race is so nearly 
 run need have no reserves of thought or feeling. I think, Mrs. 
 Tregonell, that you and Miss Bridgeman, who knows me almost 
 as well as you do ' 
 
 'Better, perhaps,' miumured Jessie, in a scarcely audible 
 voice. 
 
 'Must both know that my life for the past four years has 
 been one long regret — that all my days and hours have been 
 steeped in the bitterness of remorse. I am not going now to 
 dispute the justice of the sentence which spoiled my life and broke 
 my heart. I submitted without question, because I knew that 
 the decree was wise. I had no right to offer you the ruin of a 
 life ' 
 
 ' Do not speak of that,' cried Christabel, with a stifled sob, 
 ' for pity's sake don't speak of the past : I cannot bear it.' 
 
 ' Then I will not say another word, except to tell you that your 
 goodness to me in these latter days — your friendship, so frankly, so 
 freely given — has steeped my soul in peace — has filled my mind 
 with sweet memories which will soothe my hours of decline, when 
 I am far from this dear house where I was once so happy. I 
 wish I could leave some pleasant memory here when I am gone 
 — I wish your boy had been old enough to remember me in the 
 days to come, as one who loved him better than any one on earth 
 could love him, after his father and mother.' 
 
 Christabel answered no word. She sat with her hand before 
 her eyes — tears streaming slowly down her cheeks — tears that 
 were happily invisible in the faint light of the shaded lamps and 
 the fading fire. 
 
 And then they went on to talk of life in the abstract — it? 
 difficulties — its problems — its consolations — and of death — and 
 the dim world beyond — the unknown land of universal recom- 
 pense, where the deep joys striven after here, and never attained, 
 are to be ours in a purer and more spiritual form — where love 
 shall no longer walk hand in hand with pain and sorrow, dogged 
 by the dark spectre Death. 
 
 Illness and solitude had done much to exalt and spiritualize 
 Angus Hamleigh's mind. The religion of dogma, the strict 
 hard-and-fast creed which was the breath of life to Leonard's 
 mother, had never been grappled with or accepted by him — but 
 it was in his nature to be religious. Never at his woi-st had he 
 sheltered his errors under the bi'azen front of paganism — never 
 had he denied the beauty of a pure and perfect life, a simple 
 childlike faith, heroic self-abnegating love of God and man. He 
 had admired and honoured such virtue in others, and had been 
 sorry that Nature had cast him in a lower mould. Then had
 
 1 And Time is Setting wi' Me, 0.' 2'dl 
 
 come the sentence which told him that his days were to be of 
 the fewest, and, without conscious effort, his thoughts had taken 
 a more serious cast. The great problem had come nearer home 
 to him — and he had found its oidy solution to be hope — hope 
 more or less vague and dim — more or less secure and steadfast — 
 according to the temperament of the thinker. All metaphysical 
 argument for or against — all theological teaching could push the 
 thing no further. It seemed to him that it was the universal 
 instinct of mankind to desire and hope for an imperishable life, 
 purer, better, fairer than the life we know here — and that innate 
 in eveiy human breast there dwells capacity for immortality, and 
 disbelief in extinction — and to this universal instinct he sur- 
 rendered himself unreservedly, content to demand no stronger 
 argument than that grand chapter of Corinthians which has 
 consoled so many generations of mourners. 
 
 So now, speaking with these two women of the life to come 
 — the fair, sweet, all-satisfying life after death — he breathed no 
 word which the most orthodox churchman might not have 
 approved. He spoke in the fulness of a faith which, based on 
 instinct, and not on dogma, had ripened with the decline of all 
 delight and interest in this lower life. He spoke as a man for 
 whom earth's last moorings had been loosened, whose only hopes 
 pointed skyward. 
 
 It was while he was talking thus, with an almost passionate 
 earnestness, and yet wholly free from all earthly passion, that 
 Mr. Tregonell entered the room and stood by the door, contem- 
 plating the group by the hearth. The spectacle was not pleasant 
 to a man of intensely jealous temperament, a man who had been 
 testing and proving the wife whom he could not completely 
 trust, whom he loved grudgingly, with a savage half-angry love. 
 
 Christabel's face, dimly lighted by the lamp on the low table 
 near her, was turned towards the speaker, the lips parted, the 
 large blue eyes bright with emotion. Her hands w r ere clasped 
 upon the elbow of the chair, and her attitude was of one who 
 listens to words of deepest, dearest meaning ; while Angus 
 Ibrnleigh sat a little way olF with his eyes upon her face, hia 
 whole air and expression charged with feeling. To Leonard's 
 mind all such earnestness, all sentiment of any kind, came under 
 one category : it all meant love-making, more or less audacious, 
 more or less hypocritical, dressed in modern phraseology, sophis- 
 ticated, disguised, super-refined, fantastical, called one day 
 astheticism and peacocks' feathers, another day positivism, 
 agnosticism, Swinburne-cum-Burno-Jones-ism, but always the 
 same thing au fond, and meaning war to domestic peace. There 
 sat Jessie Bridgeman, the dragon of prudery placed within call, 
 but was any woman safer for the presence of a duenna? was it 
 uot in the nature of such people to look on simpeiingly while
 
 232 Mount Royal. 
 
 the poison cup was being quaffed, and to declare afterwards that 
 they had supposed the mixture perfectly harmless ] No doubt, 
 Tristan and Iseult had somebody standing by to play propriety 
 when they drank from the fatal goblet, and bound themselves 
 for life in the meshes of an unhappy love. No, the mere fact of 
 Miss Bridgeman's presence was no pledge of safety. 
 
 There was no guilt in Mrs. Tregonell's countenance, assuredly, 
 when she looked up and saw her husband standing near the 
 door, watchful, silent, with a pre-occupied air that was strange 
 to him. 
 
 'What is the matter, Leonard?' she asked, for his manner 
 U? 1 plied that something was amiss. 
 
 * Nothing — I — I was wondering to find you up so late — that's 
 all.' 
 
 ' The Eector and his wife stayed till eleven, and we have 
 been sitting here talking. Mr. Hamleigh means to leave us to- 
 morrow.' 
 
 • Yes, I know,' answered Leonard, curtly. ' Oh, by the way,' 
 turning to Angus, 'there is something I want to say to you 
 before you go to bed ; something about your journey to-morrow.' 
 
 ' I am quite at your service.' 
 
 Instead of approaching the group by the fireplace, Leonard 
 turned and left the room, leaving Mr. Hamleigh under the 
 necessity of following him. 
 
 ' Good-night,' he said, shaking hands with Christabel. ' I 
 shall not say good-bye till to-morrow. I suppose I shall not 
 have to leave Mount Eoyal till eleven o'clock.' 
 
 ' I think not.' 
 
 ' Good-night, Miss Bridgeman. I shall never forget how kind 
 you have been to me.' 
 
 She looked at him earnestly, but made no reply, and in the 
 next instant he was gone. 
 
 ' What can have happened ? ' asked Christabel, anxiously. ' I 
 am sure there is something wrong. Leonard's manner was so 
 strange.' 
 
 'Perhaps he and his dear friends have been quarrelling,' 
 Jessie answered, carelessly. ' I believe Captain Vandeleur 
 breaks out into vindictive language, sometimes, after he has 
 taken a little too much wine : Mop told me as much in her 
 amiable candour. And I know the Captain's glass was filled 
 very often at dinner, for I had the honour of sitting next him.' 
 
 ' I hope there is nothing really wrong,' said Christabel ; but 
 che could not get rid of the sense of uneasiness to which Leonard's 
 strange manner had given rise. 
 
 She went to her boy's nursery, as she did every night, before 
 going to bed, and said her prayers beside his pillow. She had 
 begun this one night when the child was ill, and had never
 
 •And Time is Setting wi' Me, 0.' 233 
 
 ruined a night since. That quiet recess in which the little one's 
 cot stood wad her oratory. Here, in the silence, broken only by 
 the ticking of the clock or the fall of a cinder on the hearth, 
 while the nurse slept near at hand, the mother prayed ; and her 
 prayers seemed to her sweeter and more efficacious hei*e than in 
 any other place. So soon as those childish lips could speak it 
 would be her delight to teach her son to pray ; and, in the mean- 
 time, her supplications w r ent up to Heaven for him, from a heart 
 *jhat overflowed with motherly love. There had been one dismal 
 interval of her life when she had loved no one — having really 
 no one to love — secretly loathing her husband — not daring even 
 to remember that other, once so fondly loved — and then, when 
 her desolate heart seemed w 7 alled round with an icy barrier that 
 Jivided it from all human feeling, God had given her this child, 
 ind lo ! the ice had melted, and her re-awakened soul had 
 kindled and glowed with warmth and gladness. It was not iu 
 Christabel's nature to love many things, or many people : rather 
 was it natural to her to love one person intensely, as she had 
 loved her adopted mother in her girlhood, as she had loved 
 Angus Hamleigh in the bloom of her womanhood, as she loved 
 her boy now. 
 
 She was leaving the child's room, after prayers and medi- 
 tations that had been somewhat longer than usual, when she 
 heard voices, and saw Mr. Tregonell and Mr. Hamleigh by the 
 door of the room occupied by the latter, which was at the further 
 end of the gallery. 
 
 ' You understand my plan V said Leonard. 
 
 « Perfectly.' 
 
 ' It prevents all trouble, don't you see.' 
 
 ' Yes, I believe it may,' answered Angus, and without any 
 word of good-night he opened his door and went into his room, 
 while Leonard turned on his heel and strolled to his own 
 quarters . 
 
 ' Was there anything amiss between you and Mr. Hamleigh, 
 that you parted so coldly just now V asked Christabel, presently, 
 when her husband came from his dressing-room into the bed- 
 room where she sat musing by the fire. 
 
 ' What, aren't you gone to bed yet ! ' he exclaimed. ' You 
 seem to be possessed by a wakeful demon to-night.' 
 
 ' I have been in the boy's room. Was there anything amiss, 
 Leonard? ' 
 
 ' You are monstrously anxious about it. No. What should 
 there be amiss '] You didn't expect to see us hugging each other 
 like a couple of Frenchmen, did you ? '
 
 234 Mount Royal. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 'with such remorseless speed still come NEW WOES.' 
 
 The next morning was damp, and grey, and mild, no autumn 
 wind stiring the long sweeping branches of the cedars on the 
 lawn, the dead leaves falling silently, the world all sad and 
 solemn, clad in universal greyness. Christabel was up early, 
 with her boy, in the nursery — watching him as he splashed about 
 Lis bath, and emerged rosy and joyous, like an infant river- 
 god sporting among the rashes ; early at family prayers in the 
 dining-room, a ceremony at which Mr. Tregonell rarely assisted, 
 and to which Dopsy and Mopsy came flushed and breathless 
 with hurry, anxious to pay all due respect to a hostess whom they 
 Imped to visit again, but inwardly revolting against the unreason- 
 ableness of eight-o'clock prayers. 
 
 Angus, who was generally about the gardens before eight, did 
 net aj) pear at all this morning. The other' men were habitually 
 late — breakfasting together in a free-and-easy manner when the 
 ladies had left the dining-room— so Christabel, Miss Bridgeman, 
 and the Miss Vandeleurs sat down to breakfast alone, Dopsy 
 giving little furtive glances at the door every now and then, 
 expectant of Mr. Hamleigh's entrance. 
 
 That expectancy became too painful for the damsel's patience, 
 by-and-by, as the meal advanced. 
 
 ' ; wonder what has become of Mr. Hamleigh,' she said. 
 1 This is the first time he has been late at breakfast.' 
 
 ' Perhaps he is seeing to the packing of his portmanteau,' said 
 Miss Bridgeman. ' Some valets are bad packers, and want 
 superintendence.' 
 
 ' Packing !' cried Dopsy, aghast. 'Packing! What for?' 
 ' He is going to London this afternoon. Didn't you know 1 ' 
 Dopsy grew°pale as ashes. The shock was evidently terrible, 
 and even Jessie pitied her. 
 
 ' Poor silly Dop,' she thought. ' Could she actually suppose 
 that she stood the faintest chance of bringing down her bird 1 ' 
 
 ' Going aw&y ? For good 1 ' niumiured Miss Vandeleur, 
 faintly— all the flavour gone out of the dried salmon, the Comish 
 butter, the sweet home-baked bread. 
 
 'I hope so. He is going to the South of France for the 
 winter. Of course, you kuow that he is consumptive, and hai 
 not many years to live,' answered Miss Bridgeman. 
 
 ' Poor fellow !' sighed Dopsy, with tears glittering upon hei 
 .lowered eyelids. 
 
 She had begun the chase moved chiefly by sordid instincts ;
 
 • With such Remorseless Sjjcecl still come New Woes.* 235 
 
 her tendercst emotions had been hacked and vulgarized by long 
 experience in flirtation — but at this moment she believed that 
 never in her life had she loved before, and that never in her lif e 
 could she love again. 
 
 ' And if he dies unmarried what will become of his property V 
 inquired Mopsy, whose feelings were not engaged. 
 
 ' I haven't the faintest idea,' answered Miss Bridgeman. 
 • He has no near relations. I hope he will leave his money to 
 Borne charitable institution.' 
 
 'What time does he go?' faltered Dopsy, swallowing her 
 tears. 
 
 ' Mr. Hamleigh left an hour ago, Madam,' said the butler, 
 who had been carving at the side-board during this conversation. 
 'He has gone shooting. The dog-cart is to pick him up at the 
 gate leading to St. Nectan's Kieve at eleven o'clock.' 
 
 ' Gone shooting on his last morning at Mount Royal ! ' ex- 
 claimed Jessie. ' That's a new development of Mr. Hamleigh's 
 character. I never knew he had a passion for sport.' 
 
 1 1 believe there is a note for you, ma'am,' said the butler to 
 his mistress. 
 
 He went out into the hall, and returned in a minute or two 
 carrying a letter upon his official salver, and handing it with 
 official solemnity to Mrs. Tregonell. 
 
 The letter was brief and commonplace enough — 
 
 'Dear Mrs. Tregonell, — 
 ' After all I am deprived of the opportunity of wishing you 
 good-bye this morning, by the temptation of two or three hours' 
 woodcock shooting about St. Nectan's Kieve. I shall drive 
 straight from there to Launceston in Mr. TregonelTs dog-cart, for 
 the use of which I beg to thank him in advance. I have already 
 thanked you and Miss Bridgeman for your goodness to me 
 during my late visit to Mount Royal, and can only say that my 
 gratitude lies much deeper, and means a great deal more, than 
 such expressions of thankfulness are generally intended to convey. 
 ' Ever sincerely yours, 
 
 ' Angus Hamleigh.' 
 
 ' Then this was what Leonard and he were settling last night, 
 thought Christabel. ' Your master went out with Mr. Hamleigh, 
 I suppose,' she said to the servant. 
 
 1 No, ma'am, my master is in his study. I took him his 
 breakfast an hour ago. He is writing letters, I believe.' 
 
 ' And the other two gentlemen 1 ' 
 
 'Started for Bodmin in the wagonette at six o'clock this 
 morning.' 
 
 'They are going to see that unhappy man hanged,' said Miss 
 Bridgeman. ' Congenial occupation. Mr. Montagu told me all 
 about it at dinner yesterday, and asked me if I wasn't son y that
 
 23G Mount Royal. 
 
 my sex prevented my joining the party. " It would be a new 
 sensation," he said, u and to a woman of your intelligence that 
 must be an immense attraction." I told him I had no hankering 
 after new sensations of that kind.' 
 
 ' And he is really gone — without saying good-bye to any of us,' 
 said Dopsy, still harping on the departed guest. 
 
 ' Yes, he is really gone,' echoed Jessie, with a sigh. 
 
 Christabel had been silent and absent-minded throughout the 
 meal. Her mind was troubled — she scarcely knew why ; dis- 
 turbed by the memory of her husband's manner as he parted 
 with Angus in the corridor ; disturbed by the sti*angeness of this ( 
 lonely expedition after woodcock, in a man who had always 
 shown himself indifferent to sport. As usual with her when she 
 was out of spirits, she went straight to the nursery for comfort, 
 and tried to forget everything in life except that Heaven had 
 given her a son whom she adored. 
 
 Her boy upon this particular morning was a little more fasci- 
 nating and a shade more exacting than usual ; the rain, soft and 
 gentle as it was — rather an all-pervading moisture than a positive 
 rainfall — forbade any open-air exercise for this tenderly reared 
 young person — so he had to be amused indoors. He was just of 
 an age to be played with, and to understand certain games wliich 
 tailed upon the exercise of a dawning imagination ; so it was his 
 mother's delight to ramble with him in an imaginary wood, and 
 to fly from imaginary wolves, lurking in dark caverns, repre- 
 sented by the obscure regions underneath a table-cover — or to 
 repose with him on imaginary mountain-tops on the sofa — or be 
 engulfed with him in sofa pillows, which stood for whelming 
 waves. Then there were pictures to be looked at, and little Leo 
 had to be lovingly instructed in the art of turning over a leaf 
 without tearing it from end to end — and the necessity for re- 
 straining an inclination to thrust all his fingers into his mouth 
 between whiles, and sprawl them admiringly on the page after- 
 wards. 
 
 Time so beguiled, even on the dullest morning, and with a 
 lurking, indefinite sense of trouble in her mind all the while, 
 went rapidly with Christabel. She looked up with surprise when 
 the stable clock struck eleven. 
 
 'So late? Do you know if the dog-cart has started yet, 
 Carson 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes, ma'am, I heard it drive out of the yard half-an-hour 
 ago,' answered the nurse, looking up from her needle-work. 
 
 ' Well, I must go. Good-bye, Baby. I think, if you are very 
 good, you might have your dinner with mamma. Din-din — with 
 — mum — mum — mum ' — a kiss between every nonsense syllable. 
 ' You can bring him down, nurse. I shall have only the ladies 
 wl:Ai ine at luncheon.' There were still further leave-takings,
 
 • With such Kemorseless Speed still come Neio Woes.' 237 
 
 and then Christabel went downstairs. Qn her way past hei 
 husband's study she saw the door standing ajar. 
 
 ' Are you there, Leonard, and alone 1 ' 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 She went in. He was sitting at his desk — his cheque-book 
 open, tradesmen's account", spread out before him— all the signs 
 and tokens of business-lf, e occupation. It was not often that 
 Mr. Tregonell spent a mrtrning in his study. When he did, it 
 meant a general settlement of accounts, and usually resulted in a 
 surly frame of mind, which lasted, more or less, for the rest of 
 the day. 
 
 'Did you know that Mr. Hamleigh had gone woodcock 
 Shooting I' 
 
 'Naturally, since it was I who suggested that he should have 
 a shy at the birds before he left,' answered Leonard, without 
 looking up. 
 
 He was filling in a cheque, with his head bent over the table. 
 
 ' How strange for him to go alone, in his weak health, and 
 with a fatiguing journey before him.' 
 
 ' What's the fatigue of lolling in a railway carriage 1 
 Confound it, you've made me spoil the cheque ! ' muttered 
 Leonard, tearing the oblong slip of coloured paper across and 
 aero s, impatiently. 
 
 'How your hand shakes! Have you been writing all the 
 morning?' 
 
 ' Yes — all the morning,' absently, turning over the leaves 
 of his cheque-book. 
 
 ' But you have been out — your boots are all over mud.' 
 
 'Yes, I meant to have an hour or so at the birds. I got 
 as far as WiUapark, and then remembered that Clayton wanted 
 he money for the tradesmen to-day. One must stick to one's 
 pay-day, don't you know, when one has made a rule.' 
 
 ' Of course" Oh, there are the new Quarterlies ! ' said 
 Christabel, seeing a package on the table. ' Do you mind my 
 opening them here V 
 
 ' No ; as long as you hold your tongue, and don't disturb me 
 when I'm at figures.' 
 
 This was not a very gracious permission to remain, but 
 Christabel seated herself quietly by the fire, and began to explore 
 t he two treasuries of wisdom which the day's post had brought. 
 Leonard's study looked into the stable-yard, a spacious quad- 
 rangle, with long ranges of doors and windows, saddle rooms, 
 harness rooms, loose boxes, coachmen's and groom's quarters — a 
 little colony complete in itself. From his open window the 
 Squire could give his orders, interrogate his coachman as to his 
 consumption of forage, have an ailing horse paraded before 
 trim, bully an underling, and bestow praise or blame all round, is
 
 23S Mount Royal. 
 
 it suited his humour. Here, too, were the kennels of tlie dogs, 
 whose company Mr. Tregonell liked a little better than that of 
 his fellow-men. 
 
 Leonard sat with his head bent over the table, writing, 
 Christabel in her chair by the fire turning the leaves of her 
 book in the rapture of a first skimming. They sat thus for about 
 an hour, and then both looked up with a startled air, at the 
 sound of wheels. 
 
 It was the dog-cart that was being driven into the yard, Mr. 
 Hamleigh's servant sitting behind, walled in by a portmanteau 
 and a Gladstone bag. Leonard opened the window, and looked 
 out. 
 
 ' What's up V he asked. ' Has your master changed his mind ? ' 
 
 The valet alighted, and came across the yard to the window. 
 
 ' We haven't seen Mr. Hamleigh, sir. There must have been 
 some mistake, I think. We waited at the gate for nearly an 
 hour, and then Baker said we'd better come back, as we must 
 have missed Mr. Hamleigh, somehow, and he might be here 
 waiting for us to take him to Launceston.' 
 
 ' Baker's a fool. How could you miss him if he went to the 
 Kieve 1 There's only one way out of that place — or only one 
 wav that Mr. Hamleigh could find. Did you inquire if he went 
 to the Kieve V 
 
 ' Yes, sir. Baker went into the farmhouse, and they told 
 him that a gentleman had come with his gun and a dog, and had 
 asked for the key, and had gone to the Kieve alone. They were 
 not certain as to whether he'd come back or not, but he hadn't 
 taken the key back to the house. He might have put it into his 
 pocket, and forgotten all about it, don't you see, sir, after he'd 
 let himself out of the gate. That's what Baker said ; and he 
 might have come back here.' 
 
 ' Perhaps he has come back,' answered Leonard, carelessly. 
 ' You'd better inquire.' 
 
 ' I don't think he can have returned,' said Christabel, 
 standing near the window, very pale. 
 
 'How do you know 1 ?' asked Leonard, savagely. 'You've 
 been sitting here for the last hour poring .over that book.' 
 
 ' I think I should have heard — I think I should have known,' 
 faltered Christabel, with her heart beating strangely. 
 
 There was a mystery in the return of the carriage which 
 seemed like the beginning of woe and horror — like the ripening 
 of that strange vague sense of trouble which had oppressed her 
 for the last few hours. 
 
 ' You would have heard — you would have known,' echoed her 
 husband, with brutal mockery — ' by instinct, by second Bight, 
 by animal magnetism, I suppose. You are just the sort of 
 woman to believe in that kind of rot.'
 
 ' With such Remorseless Speed still come Nav Woes' 2DD 
 
 The valet had gone across the yard on his way round to the 
 offices of the house. Christabel made no reply to her husband's 
 sneering speech, but went straight to the hall, and rang for the 
 butler. 
 
 'Have you — has any one seen Mr. Hamleigh come back to 
 the house ? ' she asked. 
 
 'No, ma'am.' 
 
 'Inquire, if you please, of every one. Make quite sure that 
 he has not returned, and then let three or four men, with Nicholls 
 at their head, go down to St. Nectan's Kieve and look for him. 
 I'm afraid there has been an accident.' 
 
 ' I hope not. ma'am,' answered the butler, who had known 
 Christabel from her babyhood, who had looked on, a pleased 
 spectator, at Mr. Hamleigh 's wooing, and whose heart was melted 
 with tenderest compassion to-day at the sight of her pallid face, 
 and eyes made large with terror. ' It's a dangerous kind of place 
 for a stranger to go clambering about with a gun, but not for 
 one that knows every stone of it, as Mr. Hamleigh do.' 
 
 'Send, and at once, please. I do not think Mr. Hamleigh, 
 having arranged for the dog-cart to meet him, would forget his 
 appointment.' 
 
 ' There's no knowing, ma'am. Some gentlemen are so wrapt 
 up in their sport.' 
 
 Christabel sat down in the hall, and waited while Daniel, the 
 butler, made his inquiries. No one had seen Mr. Hamleigh come 
 in, and everybody was ready to aver on oath if necessary that he 
 had not returned. So Nicholls, the chief coachman, a man of 
 gumption and of much renown in the household, as a person 
 whose natural sharpness had been improved by the large respon- 
 sibilities involved in a well-filled stable, was brought to receive 
 his orders from Mrs. Tregonell. Daniel admired the calm gravity 
 with which she gave the man his instructions, despite her colour- 
 less cheek and the look of pain in every feature of her face. 
 
 ' Vou will take two or three of the stablemen with you, and 
 go as fast as you can to the Kieve. You had better go in the 
 light cart, and it would be as well to take a mattress, and some 
 pillows. If — if there should have been an accident those mig!;t 
 be useful. Mr. Hamleigh left the house early this morning with 
 iris gun to go to the Kieve, and he was to have met the dog-cart 
 at eleven. Baker waited at the gate till twelve — but perhaps 
 you have heard.' 
 
 ' Yes, ma'am, Baker told me. It's strange — but Mr. Ham- 
 leigh) ked the time if be bad good sport. Do 
 v !i of the he took with him ! ; 
 . 
 'Bi it was Sambo. Si ml Iways 
 o f a of Mr. Jlaraleigh's, though h ling rather too old
 
 210 Mount Enyal. 
 
 for his work now. If it was Sambo the dog must have run away 
 and left him, for he was back about the yard before ten o'clock. 
 He'd been hurt somehow, for there was blood upon one of his 
 feet. Master had the red setter with him this morning, when he 
 went for his stroll, but I believe it must have been Sambo that 
 Mr. Hamleigh took. There was only one of the lads about the 
 yard when he left, for it was breakfast time, and the little guffin 
 didn't notice.' 
 
 ' But if all the other dogs are in their kennels — ' 
 
 ' They aren't, ma'am, don't you see. The two gentlemen 
 took a couple of 'em to Bodmin in the break — and I don't know 
 which. Sambo may have been with them — and may have got 
 tired of it and come home. He's not a dog to appreciate that 
 kind of thing.' 
 
 ' Go at once, if you please, Nicholls. You know what to do.' 
 
 ' Yes, ma'am.' 
 
 Nicholls went his way, and the gong began to sound for 
 luncheon. Mr. Tregonell, who rarely honoured the family with 
 his presence at the mid-day meal, came out of his den to-day in 
 answer to the summons, and found his wife in the hall. 
 
 ' I suppose you are coming in to luncheon,' he said to her, in 
 an angry aside. ' You need not look so scared. Your old lover 
 is safe enough, I daresay.' 
 
 ' I am not coming to luncheon,' she answered, looking at him 
 with pale contempt. ' If you are not a little more careful of your 
 words I may never break bread with you again.' 
 
 The gong went on with its discordant clamour, and Jessie 
 Bridgeman came out of the drawing-room with the younger Miss 
 Vandeleur. Poor Dopsy was shut in her own room, with ahead- 
 ache. She had been indulging herself with the feminine luxury 
 of a good cry. Disappointment, wounded vanity, humiliation, 
 and a very real penchant for the man who had despised her 
 attractions were the mingled elements in her cup of woe. 
 
 The nurse came down the broad oak staircase, baby Leonard 
 toddling by her side, and making two laborious jumps at each 
 shallow step) — one on — one off. Christabel met him, picked him 
 up in her arms, and carried him back to the nursery, where she 
 oidered his dinner to be brought. He was a little inclined to 
 resist this change of plan at the first, but was soon kissed into 
 pleasantness, and then the nurse was despatched to the servants' 
 hall, and Christabel had her boy to herself, and ministered to him 
 and amused him for the space of an hour, despite an aching heart. 
 Then, when the nurse came back, Mrs. Tregonell went to her own 
 room, and sat at the window watching the avenue by which the 
 men must drive back to the house. . 
 
 They did not come back till just when the gloom of the sunless 
 clay was deepening iuto starless night. Christabel ran down to
 
 ' With such Bemorseless Speed still come New Woes.'' 241 
 
 the lobby that opened into the stable yard, and stood in the door- 
 way waiting for Nicholls to come to her ; but if he saw her, he 
 pretended not to see her, and went straight to the house by 
 another way, and asked to speak to Mr. Tregonell. 
 
 Christabel saw him hurry across the yard to that other door, 
 and knew that her fears were realized. Evil of some kind had 
 befallen. She went straight to her husband's study, certain that 
 she would meet Nicholls there. 
 
 Leonard was standing by the fireplace, listening, while 
 Nicholls stood a little way from the door, relating the result 
 of his search, in a low agitated voice. 
 
 1 Was he quite dead when you found him ? ' asked Leonard, 
 when the man paused in his narration. 
 
 Christabel stood just within the doorway, half hidden in the 
 obscurity of the room, where there was no light but that of the 
 low tire. The door bad been left ajar by Nicholls, and neither he 
 nor his master was aware of her presence. 
 
 ' Yes, Sir. Dr. Blake said he must have been dead some 
 hours.' 
 
 ' Had the gun burst ? ' 
 
 ' No, sir. It must have gone off somehow. Perhaps the trigger 
 caught in the hand-rail when he was crossing the wooden bridge 
 — and yet that seemed hardly possible — for he was lying on tli6 
 big stone at the other side of the bridge, with his face downwards 
 close to the water.' 
 
 ' A horrible accident,' said Leonard. 'There'll be an inquest, 
 of coarse. Will Blake give the Coroner notioe — or must I % ' 
 
 ' Dr. Blake said he'd see to that, sir.' 
 
 ' And he is lying at the farm — ' 
 
 ' Yes, sir. We thought it was best to take the body there — 
 rather than to bring it home. It would have been such a shock 
 for my mistress — and the other ladies. Dr. Blake said the inquest 
 would be held at the inn at Trevena.' 
 
 1 Well,' said Leonard, with a shrug and a sigh, ' it's an awful 
 business, that's all that can be said about it. Lucky he has no 
 wife or children — no near relations to feel the blow. All we can 
 do is to show our respect for him, now he is gone. The body 
 had better be brought home here, after the inquest. It will look 
 more respectful for him to be buried from this house. Mrs. 
 Tregonell's mind can be prepared by that time. 
 
 ' It is prepared already,' said a low voice out of the shadow. 
 ' I have heard all.' 
 
 1 Very sad, isn't it 1 ' replied Leonard ; ' one of those unlucky 
 accidents which occur every shooting season. He was always a 
 little awkward with a gun —never handled one like a thorough- 
 bred sportsman.' 
 
 • Why did he go out shooting on the last morning of hi* 
 
 B
 
 242 Mount Boyal. 
 
 visit % ' asked Christabel. ' It was you who urged him to do it 
 — you who planned the whole thing.' 
 
 ' I ! What nonsense you are talking. I told him there were 
 plenty of birds about the Kieve — just as I told the other fellows. 
 That will do, Nicholls. You did all that could be done. Go 
 and get your dinner, but first send a mounted groom to Trevena 
 to ask Blake to come over here.' 
 
 Nicholls bowed and retired, shutting the door behind him. 
 
 'He is dead, then,' said Christabel, coming over to the hearth 
 where her husband was standing. ' He has been killed.' 
 
 'He has had the bad luck to kill himself, as many a better 
 Bportsman than he has done before now,' answered Leonard, 
 roughly. 
 
 ' If I could be sure of that Leonard, if I could be sure that 
 his death was the work of accident — I should hardly grieve for 
 him — knowing that he was reconciled to the idea of death — and 
 that if God had spared him this sudden end, the close of his life 
 must have been full of pain and weariness.' 
 
 Tears were streaming down her cheeks — tears which she 
 made no effort to restrain — such tears as friendship and affection 
 
 five to the dead — tears that had no taint of guilt. But 
 ,eonard's jealous soul was stung to fury by those innocent tears. 
 
 'Why do you stand there snivelling about him,' he 
 exclaimed ; 'do you want to remind me how fond you were of 
 him — and how little you ever cared for me. Do you suppose 
 I am stone blind — do you suppose I don't know you to the core 
 of your heart ? ' 
 
 i If you know my heart you must know that it is as guiltless 
 of sin against you, and as true to my duty as a wife, as you, my 
 husband, can desire. But you must know that, or you would 
 not have brought Angus Hamleigh to this house.' 
 
 'Perhaps I wanted to try you — to watch you and him 
 together — to see if the old fire was quite burnt out.' 
 
 ' You could not be so base — so contemptible.' 
 
 ' There is no knowing what a man may be when he is used 
 as I have been by you — looked down upon from the height of 
 a superior intellect, a loftier nature — told to keep his distance, 
 as a piece of vulgar clay — hardly fit to exist beside that fine 
 porcelain vase, his wife. Do you think it was a pleasant spec- 
 tacle for me to see you and Angus Hamleigh sympathizing and 
 twaddling about Browning's last poem — or sighing over a sonata 
 of Beethoven's — I who was outside all that kind of thing 1 — a 
 boor — a dolt — to whom your fine sentiments and your flummery 
 were an unknown language. But I was only putting a case just 
 now. I liked Hamleigh well enough — in his way — and I asked 
 him here because I thought it waa giving a chance to th# 
 Vandeleur girls. That was my motive — and my only motive.'
 
 1 Tours on Monday, God's to-day.' 213 
 
 ' And he came — and he is dead,' answered Christabel, in icy 
 tones. 'He went to that lonely place this morning — at your 
 instigation — and he met his death there — no one knows how — 
 no one ever will know.' 
 
 ' At my instigation ? — confound it, Christabel — you have no 
 right to say such things. I told him it was a good place for 
 woodcock — and it pleased his fancy to try his luck there before 
 he left. Lonely place, be hanged. It is a place to which every 
 tourist goes — it is as well known as the road to this house.' 
 
 ' Yet he was lying there for hours and no one knew. If 
 Nicholls had not gone he might be lying there still. He may 
 have lain there wounded — his life-blood ebbing away — dying by 
 inches — without help — with a creature to succour or comfort him. 
 It was a cruel place — a place where no help could come.' 
 
 ' Fortune of war,' answered Leonard, with a careless shrug. 
 ' A sportsman must die where his shot finds him. There's many 
 a day I might have fallen in the Rockies, and lain there for tha 
 lynxes and the polecats to pick my bones ; and I have walked 
 shoulder to shoulder with death on mountain passes, when every 
 step on the crumbling track might send me sliding down to the 
 bottomless pit. below. As for poor Hamleigh ; well, as you say 
 yourself, he was a doomed man — a little sooner or later could 
 not make much difference.' 
 
 ' Perhaps not,' said Christabel gloomily, going slowly to the 
 door ; ' but I want to know how he died.' 
 
 'Let us hope that the coroner's inquest will make your mind 
 easy oh that point,' retorted her husband as she left the room. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 'YOURS ON MONDAY, GOD'S TO-DAY.* 
 
 The warning gong sounded at half-past seven as usual, and at 
 eight the butler announced dinner. Captain Vandeleur and 
 Mr. Montagu had returned from Bodmin, and they were 
 grouped in front of the fire talking in undertones with Mr. 
 Tregonell, while Christabel and the younger Miss Vandeleur sat 
 on a sofa, silent, after a few murmured expressions of grief oo 
 on the part of the latter lady. 
 
 'It is like a dream,' sighed Mopsy, this being the one 
 remark which a young person of her calibre inevitably makes 
 upon such an occasion. 'It is like a dreadful dream — playing 
 billiards last night, and now — dead ! It is too awful.' 
 
 ' Yes, it is awful ; Death is always awful,' answered Christ- 
 abel, mechanically.
 
 244 Mount Royal. 
 
 She had told herself that it was her duty to appear at thf 
 dinner-table — to fulfil all her responsibilities as wife and hostess 
 — not to give any one the right to say that she was bemoaning 
 him who had once been her lover ; and she was here to do her 
 duty. She wanted all the inhabitants of her little world to see 
 that she mourned for him only as a friend grieves for the loss of 
 a friend — soberly, with pious submission to the Divine Will 
 that had taken him away. For two hours she had remained on 
 her knees beside her bed, drowned in tears, numbed by despair, 
 feeling as if life could not go on without him, as if this heavily 
 beating heart of hers must be slowly throbbing to extinction : 
 and then the light of reason had begun to glimmer through the 
 thick gloom of grief, and her lips had moved in prayer, and, as if 
 in answer to her prayers, came the image of her child, to comfort 
 and sustain her. 
 
 ' Let me not dishonour my darling,' she prayed. ' Let me 
 remember that I am a mother as well as a wife. If I owe my 
 husband very little, I owe my son everything.' 
 
 Inspired by that sweet thought of her boy, unwilling, for his 
 sake, to give occasion for even the feeblest scandal, she had 
 washed the tears from her pale cheeks, and put on a dinner 
 gown, and had gone down to the drawing-room just ten minutes 
 before the announcement of dinner. 
 
 She remembered how David, when his beloved was dead, 
 had risen and washed and gone back to the business of life. 
 ' What use are ray tears to him, now he is gone V she said to her- 
 self, as she \*ent downstairs. 
 
 Miss Bridgeman was not in the drawing-room ; but Mopsy 
 was there, dressed in black, and looking very miserable. 
 
 ' I could not get poor Dop to come down,' she said, apolo- 
 getically. ' She has been lying on her bed crying ever since she 
 heard the dreadful news. She is so sensitive, poor girl ; and she 
 liked him so much ; and he had been so attentive to her. I hope 
 you'll excuse her 1 ' 
 
 ' Please don't apologize. I can quite imagine that this shock 
 has been dreadful for her — for every one in the house. Perhaps 
 you would rather dine upstairs, so as to be with your sister 1 ' 
 
 1 No!' answered Mopsy, taking Christabel's hand, with a touch 
 of real feeling. • I had rather be with you. You must feel hia 
 loss more than we can — you had known him so much longer.' 
 
 ' Yes, it is just five years since he came to Mount RoyaL 
 Five years is not much in the lives of some people ; but it seems 
 the greater part of my life.' 
 
 ' We will go away to-morrow,' said Mopsy. ' I am sure you 
 will be glad to get rid of us : it will be a relief, I mean. Per- 
 haps at some future time you will let us come again for a little 
 while. We have been so intensely happy here.'
 
 'Yours on Monday, God's to-day* 245 
 
 ' Then I shall be happy for you to come again — next summer, 
 if we axe here,' answered Christabel, kindly, moved by Mopsy's 
 naivete, ' one can never tell. Next year seems so far off in the 
 hour of trouble.' 
 
 Dinner was announced, and they all went in, and made believe 
 to dine, in a gloomy silence, broken now and then by dismal 
 attempts at general conversation on the part of the men. Once 
 Mopsy took heart of grace and addressed her brother : 
 
 ' Did you like the hanging, Jack?' she asked, as if it were a 
 play. 
 
 1 No, it was hideous, detestable. I will never put myself in 
 the way of being so tortured again. The guillotine is swifter 
 and more merciful. I saw a man blown from a gun in India 
 — there were bits of him on my boots when I got home — but it 
 was not so bad as the hanging to-day : the limp, helpless figure, 
 swaying and trembling in the hangman's grip while they put 
 the noose on, the cap dragged roughly over the ghastly face, the 
 monotonous croak of the parson reading on like a machine, 
 while the poor wretch was being made ready for his doom. It 
 was all horrible to the last degree. Why can't we poison our 
 criminals; let them die comfortably, as Socrates died, of a dose 
 of some strong narcotic. The parson might have some chance — 
 sitting by the dying man's bed, in the quiet of his cell.' 
 
 ' It would be much nicer,' said Mopsy. 
 
 ' "Where's Miss Bridgeman ] ' Leonard asked, suddenly, looking 
 round the table, as if only that moment perceiving her absence. 
 
 ' She is not in her room, Sir. Mary thinks she has gone out,' 
 answered the butler. 
 
 ' Gone out — after dark. What can have been her motive for 
 going out at such an hour '? ' asked Leonard of his wife, angrily. 
 
 ' I have no idea. She may have been sent for by some sick 
 person. You know how good she is.' 
 
 ' I know what a humbug she is,' retorted Leonard. ' Daniel, 
 go and find out if any messenger came for Miss Bridgeman — or 
 if she left any message for your mistress.' 
 
 Daniel went out and came back again in five minutes. No 
 one had seen any messenger — no one had seen Miss Bridgeman 
 go out. 
 
 'That's always the case here when I want to ascertain a 
 fact,' growled Leonard : ' no one sees or knows anything. There 
 are twice too many servants for one to be decently served. Well, 
 it doesn't matter much. Miss Bridgeman is old enough to take 
 care of herself — and if she walks off a cliff — it will be her loss 
 and nobody else's. 1 
 
 ' I don't think you ought to speak like that of a person whom 
 your mother loved — and who is my most intimate friend,' said 
 Christabel, with grave reproach.
 
 24G Mount Boyal 
 
 Leonard had drunk a good deal at dinner ; and indeed there 
 had been an inclination on the part of all three men to drown 
 their gloomy ideas in wine, while even Mopsy, who generally 
 took her fair share of champagne, allowed the butler to fill her 
 glass rather oftener than usual — sighing as she sipped the spark- 
 ling bright-coloured wine, and remembering, even in the midst 
 of her regret for the newly dead, that she would very soon have 
 returned to a domicile where Moet was not the daily beverage, 
 nay, where, at times, the very beer-barrel ran dry. 
 
 After dinner Christabel went to the nursery. It flashed 
 upon her with acutest pain as she entered the room, that when 
 last she had been there she had not known of Angus Ham- 
 leigh's death. He had been lying yonder by the waterfall, 
 dead, and she had not known. And now the fact of his death 
 was an old thing — part of the history of her life. 
 
 The time when he was alive and with her full of bright 
 thoughts and poetic fancies, seemed ever so long ago. Yet it 
 was only yesterday — yesterday, and gone from her life as utterly 
 as if it were an episode in the records of dead and gone ages — as 
 old as the story of Tristan and Iseult. She sat with her boy till 
 he fell asleep, and sat beside him as he slept, in the dim light of 
 the night-lamp, thinking of him who lay dead in the lonely 
 farmhouse among those green hills they two had loved so well 
 — hushed by the voice of the distant sea, sounding far inland 
 in the silence of night. 
 
 She remembered how he had talked last night of the undis- 
 covered country, and how, as he talked, with flushed cheeks, and 
 too brilliant eyes, she had seen the stamp of death on his face. 
 They had talked of ' The Gates Ajar,' a book which they had 
 read together in the days gone by, and which Christabel had 
 often returned to since that time — a book in which the secrets of 
 the future are touched lightly by a daring but a delicate hand 
 — a book which accepts every promise of the Gospel in its most 
 literal sense, and overflows with an exultant belief in just such a 
 Heaven as poor humanity wants. In this author's creed 
 transition from death to life is instant — death is the Lucina of 
 life. There is no long lethargy of the grave, there is no time of 
 darkness. Straight from the bed of death the spirit rushes to 
 the arms of the beloved ones who have gone before. Death, so 
 glorified, becomes only the reunion of love. 
 
 He had talked of Socrates, and the faithful few who waited 
 at the prison doors in the early morning, when the sacred ship 
 had returned, and the end was near ; and of that farewell 
 discourse in the upper chamber of the house at Jerusalem 
 which seems dimly foreshadowed by the philosopher's converse 
 with his disciples — at Athens, the struggle towards light — at 
 Jerusalem the light itself in fullest glory.
 
 * Yours on Monday, God's to-day.' 247 
 
 Christabel felt herself bound by no social duty to return to 
 the drawing-room, more especially as Miss Vandeleur had gone 
 upstairs to sit with the afflicted Dopsy — who was bewailing the 
 dead very sincerely in her own fashion, with little bursts of 
 hysterical tears and fragmentary remarks. 
 
 1 1 know ke didn't care a straw for me ' — she gasped, dabbing 
 her temples with a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne — ' yet 
 it seemed sometimes almost as if he did : he was so attentive — 
 but then he had such lovely manners — no doubt he was just as 
 attentive to all girls. Oh, Mop, if he had cared for me, and if I 
 had married him — what a paradise this earth would have been. 
 Mr. Tregonell told me tliat he had quite four thousand a year/ 
 
 And thus — and thus, with numerous variations on the same 
 theme — poor Dopsy mourned for the dead man ; while the low 
 murmur of the distant sea, beating for ever and for ever against 
 the horned cliffs, and dashing silvery white about the base of 
 that Mechard Rock which looks like a couchant lion keeping 
 guard over the shore, sounded like a funeral chorus in the pauses 
 of her talk. 
 
 It was half-past ten when Christabel left her boy's bed-side, 
 and, on her way to her own room, suddenly remembered Jessie's 
 unexplained absence. 
 
 She knocked at Miss Bridgeman's door twice, but there was 
 no answer, and then she opened the door and looked in, expecting 
 to find the room empty. 
 
 Jessie was sitting in front of the fire in her hat and jacket, 
 staring at the burning coals. There was no light in the room, 
 except the glow and name of the fire, but even in that cheerful 
 light Jessie looked deadly pale. ' Jessie,' exclaimed Christabel, 
 going up to her and putting a gentle hand upon her shoulder, for 
 she took no notice of the opening of the door, ' where in heaven's 
 name have you been 1 ' 
 
 * Where should I have been ? Surely you can guess 1 I have 
 been to see him.' 
 
 1 To the farm — alone — at night 1 ' 
 
 1 Alone — at night — yes ? I would have walked through storm 
 
 and fire — I would have walked through ' she set her lips like 
 
 iron, and muttered through her clenched teeth, ' Hell.' 
 
 'Jessie, Jessie, how foolish ! What good could it do? ' 
 
 ' None to him, I know, but perhaps a little to me. I think if 
 I had stayed here I should have gone stark, staring mad. I felt 
 my brain reeling as I sat and thought of him in the twilight, and 
 then it seemed to me as if the only comfort possible was in look- 
 ing at his dead face— holding his dead hand — and I have done it, 
 and am comforted — a little,' she said, with a laugh, which ended 
 in a convulsive sob. 
 
 4 2<iy good warm-hearted Jessie ! ' murmured Christabel,
 
 24S Mount Royal 
 
 u 
 
 bending over her lovingly, tears raining down her cheeks ; *I 
 know you always liked him.' 
 
 ' Always liked him ! ' echoed the other, staring at the fire, in 
 blank tearless grief ; ' liked him 1 yes, always.' 
 
 'But you must not take his death so despairingly, de:vr. 
 You know that, under the fairest cii eumstances, he had not 
 very long to live. We both knew that.' 
 
 'Yes! we knew it. I knew — thought that I had realized 
 the fact — told myself every day that in a few months he would 
 be hidden from us under ground — gone to a life where we 
 cannot follow him even with our thoughts, though we pretend 
 to be so sure about it, as those women do in " The Gates Ajar." 
 I told myself this every day. And yet, now that he is snatched 
 away suddenly — cruelly — mysteriously — it is as hard to bear 
 as if I had believed that he would live a hundred years. I 
 am not like you, a piece of statuesque perfection. I cannot 
 say " Thy will be done,'' when my dearest—the only man I ever 
 loved upon this wide earth is snatched from me. Does that 
 shock your chilly propriety, you who only half loved him, and 
 who broke his heart at another woman's bidding ? Yes ! 1 loved 
 him from the first — loved him all the while he was your lover, 
 and found it enough for happiness to be in his company — to 
 see and hear him, and answer every thought of his with sympa- 
 thetic thoughts of mine — understanding him quicker and better 
 than you could, bright as you are — happy to go about with you 
 two — to be the shadow in the sunshine of your glad young 
 lives, just as a dog who loved him would have been happy 
 following at his heels. Yes, Belle, I loved him — I think almost 
 from the hour he came here, in the sweet autumn twilight, 
 when I saw that poetic face, half in fire-glow and half in 
 darkness — loved him always, always, always, and admired him 
 as the most perfect among men ! ' 
 
 ' Jessie, my dearest, my bravest ! And you were so true 
 and loyal. You never by word or look defrayed ' 
 
 ' What do you think of me ] ' cried Jessie, indignantly. ' Do 
 you suppose that I would not rather have cut out my tongue — 
 thrown myself off the nearest cliff — than give him one lightest 
 occasion to suspect what a paltry-souled creature I was — so 
 weak that I could not cure myself of loving another woman's 
 lover. While he lived I hated myself for my folly ; now he 
 is dead, I glory in the thought of how I loved him — how I 
 gave him the most precious treasures of my soul — my reverence — 
 my regard — ray tears and hopes and prayers. Those are the 
 only gold and frankincense and r myrrk which the poor of thia 
 earth can offer, and I gave them freely to my divinity 1 ' 
 
 Christabel laid her hand upon the passionate lips ; and 
 kneeling by her friend's side, comforted her with gentle caresses.
 
 1 Yours on Monday, GocTs to-day* 210 
 
 'Do yon suppose I am nut sorry for him, Jessie?' she said 
 reproachfully, after a long pause. 
 
 ' Yes, no doubt you are, in your way ; but it is such an 
 icy way.' 
 
 ' Would you have me go raving about the house — I, Leonard's 
 wife, Leo's mother? I try to resign myself to God's will : but 
 I shall remember him till the end of my days, with unspeakable 
 sorrow. He wa/° like sunshine in my life ; so that life without him 
 seemed all one dull grey, till the baby came, and brought me 
 back to the sunlight, and gave me new duties, new cares ! ' 
 
 ' Yes ! you can find comfort in a baby's arms — that is a 
 blessing. My comfort was to see my beloved in his bloody 
 shroud — shot through the heart — shot'through the heart ! Well, 
 the inquest will find out something to-morrow, I hope ; but I 
 want you to go with me to-morrow morning, as soon as it is 
 light to the Kieve.' 
 
 1 What for ? ' 
 
 'To see the spot where he died.' 
 
 'W' at will be the good, Jessie ? I know the place too well ; 
 it hi'.- leeu in my mind all this evening.' 
 
 " I'here will be some good, perhaps. At any rate, I want 
 you to go with me ; and if there ever was any reality in your 
 love, if you are not merely a beautiful piece of mechanism, with 
 a heart that beats by clockwork, you will go.' 
 
 ' If you wish it I will go.' 
 
 ' As soon as it is light — pay at seven o'clock.' 
 
 ' I will not go till after breakfast. I want the business of 
 the house to go on just as calmly as if this calamity had never 
 happened. I don't want any one to be able to say, " Mrs. 
 Tregonell is in despair at the loss of her old lover." ' 
 
 'In fact you want people to suppose that you never cared 
 for him! ' 
 
 ' They cannot suppose that, when I was once so proud of my 
 love. All I want is that no one should think I loved him too well 
 after I was a wife and mother. I will give no occasion for scandal.' 
 
 ' Didn't I say that you were a handsome automaton ? ' 
 
 ' I do not want any one to say hard things of me when I am 
 dead — hard things that my son may hear.' 
 
 'When you are dead ! You talk as if you thought you 
 were to die soon. You are of the stuff that wears to threescore- 
 and-ten, and even beyond the Psalmist's limit. There is no 
 friction for natures of your calibre. When Werther had shot 
 himself, Charlotte went on cutting bread and butter, don't you 
 know? It was her nature to be proper, and good, and useful, 
 and never to give offence — her nature to cut bread and butter/ 
 concluded Jessie, laughing bitterly. 
 
 Christabel stayed with her for an hour, talking to her.
 
 250 Mount BoyaL 
 
 t'onsoling her, speaking hopefully of that unknown world, so 
 fondly longed for, so piously believed in by the woman who had 
 learnt her creed at Mrs. Tregonell't knees. Many tears were 
 shed by Christabel during that hour of mournful talk ; but not 
 one by Jessie Bridgeman. Hers was a dry-eyed grief. 
 
 'After breakfast then we will walk to the Kieve,' said 
 Jessie, as Christabel left her. 'Would it be too much to ask 
 you to make it as early as you can 1 ' 
 
 ' I will go the moment I am free. Good-night, dear.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 DUEL OR MURDER? 
 
 All the household appeared at breakfast next morning ; even 
 poor Dopsy, who felt that she could not nurse her grief in soli- 
 tude any longer. ' It's behaving too much as if you were his 
 widow,' Mopsy had told her, somewhat harshly ; and then there 
 was the task of packing, since they were to leave Mount Royal 
 at eleven, in order to be at Launceston in time for the one 
 o'clock train. This morning's breakfast was less silent than the 
 dinner of yesterday. Everybody felt as if Mr. Hamleigh had 
 been dead at least a week. 
 
 Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu discussed the sad 
 event openly, as if the time for reticence were past ; speculated 
 and argued as to how the accident could have happened ; talked 
 learnedly about guns ; wondered whether the country surgeon 
 was equal to the difficulties of the case. 
 
 ' I can't understand,' said Mr. Montagu, ' if he was found 
 lying in the hollow by the waterfall, how his gun came to go off. 
 If he had been going through a hedge, or among the brushwood 
 on the slope of the hill, it would be easy enough to see how the 
 thing might have happened ; but as it is, I'm all in the dark.' 
 
 ' You had better go and watch the inquest, and make yourself 
 useful to the coroner,' sneered Leonard , who had been drinking 
 his coffee in moody silence until now. ' You seem to think 
 yourself so uncommonly clever and far seeing.' 
 
 ' Well, I flatter myself I know as much about sport as most 
 men ; and I've handled a gun before to-day, and know that the 
 worst gun that was ever made won't go off and shoot a fellow 
 through the heart without provocation of some kind.' 
 
 ' Who said he was shot through the heart ? ' 
 
 ' Somebody did — one of your people, I think. 
 
 Mrs. Tregonell sat at the other end of the table, half hidden 
 by the large old-fashioned silver urn, and next her sat Jessie 
 Bridgeman, a spare small figure in a close-fitting black gown,
 
 Duel or Murder ? 251 
 
 a pale drawn face with a look of burnt-out fires — pa2e as the 
 crater when the volcanic forces have exhausted themselves. At 
 a look from Christabel she rose, and they two left the room 
 ton-ether. Five minutes later they had left the house, and were 
 walking towards the cliif, by following which they could reach 
 the Kieve without going down into Boscastle. It was a wild 
 walk for a windy autumn day ; but these two loved its wildness 
 — had walked here in many a happy hour, with souls full of 
 careless glee. Now they walked silently, swiftly, looking neither 
 to the s?a nor the land, though both were at their loveliest in 
 the shifting lights and shadows of an exquisite October morning 
 — sunshine enough to make one believe it was summer — breezes 
 enough to blow about the fleecy clouds in the blue, clear sky, to 
 ripple the soft dun-coloured heather on the hillocky common, 
 and to give life and variety to the sea. 
 
 It was a long walk ; but the length of the way seemed of 
 little account to these two. Christabel had only the sense of 
 a dreary monotony of grief. Time and space had lost their 
 meaning. This dull aching sorrow was to last for ever — till the 
 grave — broken only by brief intervals of gladness and forget- 
 fulness with her boy. 
 
 To-day she could hardly keep this one source of consolation 
 in her mind. All her thoughts were centered upon him who lay 
 yonder dead. 
 
 ' Jessie,' she said, suddenly laying her hand on her com- 
 panion's wrist, as they crossed the common above the slate- 
 quarry, seaward of Trevalga village, with its little old church 
 and low square tower. ' Jessie, I am not going to see him.' 
 
 1 What weak stuff you are made of,' muttered Jessie, con- 
 temptuously, turning to look into the white frightened face. 
 'No, you are not going to look upon the dead. You would be 
 afraid, and it might cause scandal. No, you are only going to 
 see the place where he died ; and then perhaps you, or I will see 
 a little further into the darkness that hides his fate. You heard 
 how those men were puzzling their dull brains about it at break- 
 fast. Even they can see that there is a mystery.' 
 
 ' What do you mean 1 ' 
 
 * Only as much as I say. I know nothing — yet.' 
 
 ' But you suspect ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. My mind is full of suspicion ; but it is all guess- worl 
 — no shred of evidence to go upon.' 
 
 They came out of a meadow into the high road presently— 
 the pleasant rustic road which so many happy holiday-making 
 people tread in the sweet summer time — the way to that wild 
 spot where England's first hero was born ; the Englishman'! 
 Troy, cradle of that fair tradition out of which grew the English- 
 man's Jliad.
 
 252 Mount Boyal. 
 
 Beside the gate through which they came lay that mighty 
 slab of spar which has been christened King Arthur's Quoit, but 
 tvhich the Rector of Trevalga declared to be the covering stone 
 of a Cromlech. Christabel remembered how facetious they had 
 all been about Arthur and his game of quoits, five years ago, in 
 the bright autumn weather, when the leaves were blown about 
 so lightly in the warm west wind. And now the leaves fell 
 with a mournful heaviness, and every falling leaf seemed an 
 emblem of death. 
 
 They went to the door of the farm-house to get the key of 
 the gate which leads to the Kieve. Christabel stood in the 
 little quadrangular garden, looking up at the house, while Jessie 
 rang and asked for what she wanted. 
 
 ' Did no one except Mr. Hamleigh go to the Kieve yesterday 
 until the men went to look for him 1 ' she asked of the young 
 woman who brought her the key. 
 
 ' No one else, Miss. No one but him had the key. They 
 found it in the pocket of his shooting jacket when he was brought 
 
 here.' 
 
 Involuntarily, Jessie put the key to her lips. His hand was 
 almost the last that had touched it. 
 
 Just as they were leaving the garden, where the last of the 
 yellow dahlias were fading, Christabel took Jessie by the arm, 
 and stopped her. 
 
 ' In which room is he lying ? ' she asked. ' Can we see the 
 window from here 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes, it is that one.' 
 
 Jessie pointed to a low, latticed window in the old grey 
 house— a casement round which myrtle and honeysuckle clung 
 lovingly. The lattice stood open. The soft sweet air was ' 
 blowing into the room, just faintly stirring the white dimity 
 curtain. And he was lying there in that last ineffable repose. 
 
 They went up the steep lane, between tall tangled hedges, 
 where the ragged robin still showed his pinky blossoms, and 
 many a pale yellow hawksweed enlivened the faded foliage, 
 while the ferns upon the banks, wet from yesterday's rain, still 
 grew rankly green. 
 
 On the crest of the hill the breeze grew keener, and the dead 
 leaves were being ripped from the hedgerows, and whirled down, 
 into the hollow, where the autumn wind seemed to follow 
 Christabel and Jessie as they descended, with a long plaintive 
 minor cry, like the lament at an Irish funeral. All was dark 
 and desolate in the green valley, as Jessie unlocked the gate, and 
 they went slowly down the steep slippery path, among moss-grown 
 rock and drooping fern— down and down, by sharply winding 
 ways, so narrow that they could only go one by one, till they 
 came within the sound of the rushing water, and then down into
 
 Duel or Murder t 253 
 
 the narrow cleft, whore the waterfall tumbles into abroad shallow 
 bed, and dribbles away among green sliniy rocks. 
 
 Here there is a tiny bridge — a mere plank — that spans the 
 water, with a hand-rail on one side. They crossed this, and stood 
 on the broad flat stone on the other side. This is the very heart 
 of St. Nectan's mystery. Here, high in air, the water pierces 
 the rock, and falls, a slender silvery column, into the rocky bed 
 below. 
 
 ' Look ! ' said Jessie Bridgeman, pointing down at the stone. 
 
 There were marks of blood upon it — the traces of stains 
 which had been roughly wiped away by the men who found the 
 body. 
 
 ' This is where he stood,' said Jessie, looking round, and then 
 she ran suddenly across to the narrow path on the other side. 
 ' And some one else stood here — here — just at the end of the 
 bridge. There are marks of other feet here.' 
 
 ' Those of the men who came to look for him,' said 
 ChristabeL' 
 
 ' Yes ; that makes it difficult to tell. There are the traces of 
 many feet. Yet I know,' she muttered, with clenched teeth, 
 'that some one stood here — just here — and shot him. They 
 were standing face to face. See ! ' — she stepped the bridge with 
 light swift feet — ' so ! at ten paces. Don't you see 1 ' 
 
 Christabel looked at her with a white scared face, remembering 
 her husband's strange manner the night before last, and those 
 parting words at Mr. Hamleigh's bed-room door. ' You under- 
 stand my plan ? ' ' Perfectly.' ' It saves all trouble, don't you 
 see.' Those few words had impressed themselves upon her memory 
 — insignificant as they were — because of something in the tone in 
 which they were spoken — something in the manner of the two 
 men. 
 
 'You mean,' she said slowly, with her hand clenching the 
 rail of the bridge, seeking unconsciously for support ; ' you mean 
 that Angus and my husband met here by appointment, and 
 fought a duel ?' 
 
 ' That is my reading of the mystery.' 
 
 1 Here in this lonely place — without witnesses — my husband 
 murdered him ! ' 
 
 ' They would not count it murder. Fate might have been the 
 other way. Your husband might have been killed.' 
 
 'No!' cried Christabel, passionately; 'Angus would not 
 have killed him. That would have been too deep a dishonour !' 
 She stood silent for a few moments, white as death, looking 
 round her with wide, despairing eyes. 
 
 ' He has been murdered ! ' she said, in hoarse, faint tones. 
 'That suspicion has been in my mind dark — shapeless — horrible 
 —from the fust. He has been murdered ! And I am to spend
 
 2j4 Mount Royal. 
 
 the rest of m) life with his murderer ! ' Then, with a sudden 
 hysterical cry, she turned angrily upon Jessie. 
 
 'How dare you tell lies about my husband V she exclaimed. 
 Don't you know that nobody came here yesterday except Angu s ; 
 no one else had the key. The girl at the farm told us so.' 
 
 • The key ! ' echoed Jessie, contemptuously. ' Do you think 
 a gale, breast high, would keep out an athlete 'like your husband i 
 Besides, there is another way of getting here, without going 
 near the gate, where he might be seen, perhaps, by some farm 
 labourer in the field. The men were ploughing there yesterday, 
 and heard a shot. They told me that last night at the farm. 
 Wait ! wait ! ' cried Jessie, excitedly. 
 
 She rushed away, light as a lapwing, flying across the 
 narrow bridge bounding from stone to stone — vanishing amidst 
 dark autumn foliage. Christabel heard her steps dying away 
 in the distance. Then there was an interval of some minutes, 
 during which Christabel, hardly caring to wonder what had 
 become of her companion, stood clinging to the handrail, and 
 staring down at stones and shingle, feathery ferns, soddened logs, 
 logs, the water rippling and lapping round all things, crystal clear. 
 Then startled by a voice above her head, she looked up and 
 saw Jessie's light figure just as she dropped herself over the 
 sharp arch of rock, and scrambled through the cleft, hanging on 
 by her hands, finding a foothold in the most perilous places— in 
 danger of instant death. 
 
 'My God!' murmured Christabel, with clasped hands, not 
 daring to cry aloud lest she should increase Jessie's peril. ' She 
 will be killed.' 
 
 With a nervous grip, and a muscular strength which no one 
 could have supposed possible in so slender a frame, Jessie 
 Bridgeman made good her descent, and stood on the shelf of 
 slippery rock, below the waterfall, unhurt save for a good many 
 scratches and cuts upon the hands that had clung so fiercely tC 
 root and bramble, crag and boulder. 
 
 ' What I could do your husband could do,' she said. * He 
 did it often when he was a boy — you must remember his 
 boasting of it. He did it yesterday. Look at this.' 
 
 _ ' This ' was a ragged narrow shread of heather cloth, with a 
 brick-dust red tinge in its dark warp, which Leonard had much 
 affected this year—' Mr. Tregonell's colour, is it not 1 ' asked 
 Jessie. 
 
 ' Yes — it is like his coat.' 
 
 ' Like ? It is a part of his coat. I found it hanging on a 
 bramble, at the top of the cleft. Try if you can find the coat 
 when you get home, and «ee if it is not torn. But most likely 
 he will have hidden the clothes he wore yesterday. Murderers 
 generally do.'
 
 Bud or Murder ? 255 
 
 'How dare you call him a murderer ? ' said Christabel, 
 
 trembling, and cold to the heart. It seemed to her as if the mild 
 autumnal air— here in this sheltered nook which was always 
 wanner than the rest of the world — had suddenly become an 
 icy blast that blew straight from far away arctic seas. ' How 
 dare you call my husband a murderer 1 ' 
 
 ' Oh, I forgot. It was a duel I suppose : a fair fight, planned 
 so skilfully that the result should seem like an accident, and the 
 survivor should run no risk. Still to my mind, it was murder 
 all the same — for I know who provoked the quarrel — yes — 
 and you know — you, who are his wife — and who for respecta- 
 bility's sake, will try to shield him — you know — for you must 
 have seen hatred and murder in his face that night when he 
 came into the drawing-room— and asked Mr. Hamleigh for a 
 few words in private. It was then he planned this work,' 
 pointing to the broad level stone against which the clear water 
 was rippling with such a pretty playful sound, while those two 
 women stood looking at each other with pale intent faces, fixed 
 eyes, and tremulous lips; 'and Angus Hamleigh, who valued 
 his brief remnant of earthly life so lightly, consented — reluctantly 
 perhaps — but too proud to refuse. And he hied in the air — yes, 
 I know he would not have injured your husband by so much as 
 a hair of his head — I know him well enough to be sure of that. 
 He came here like a victim to the altar. Leonard Tregonell must 
 have known that. And I say that though he, with his Mexican 
 freebooter's morality, may have called it a fair fight, it was 
 murder, deliberate, diabolical murder.' 
 
 ' If this is true,' said Christabel in a low voice, ' I will have 
 no mercy upon him.' ■ 
 
 ' Oh, yes, you will. You will sacrifice feeling to propriety, 
 you will' put a good face upon things, for the sake of your son. 
 You were born and swaddled in the purple of respectability. 
 You will not stir a finger to avenge the dead.' 
 
 ' I will have no mercy upon him,' repeated Christabel, with a 
 strange look in her eyes. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 1 DUST TO DUST.' 
 
 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 sever© interrogation. A gentleman staying
 
 256 Movnt Royal. 
 
 in a country house goes out shooting, and is so unlucky ,13 to 
 skoot 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 hues,' 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 him- 
 self. 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 Shakespeare, though he had never read a Shakespearian play in 
 his life. ' If Hamleigh was so dead tired of ife 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 
 residt 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 him- 
 self, 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 ? '
 
 *Dust to Dust' 257 
 
 • No ', I don't think he had any trouble on hia 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 mornine, that 
 nc one else had asked for the key till the men came from Mount 
 lloyal— 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 gavi 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, 
 tired 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 th sir 
 verdict. 
 
 ' Death by misadventure.' 
 
 The body was carried to Mount Royal after dark, and thr*a 
 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 
 earjth ; for Angus Hamleigh, dying a bachelor, and leaving a hand- 
 some 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 
 r«f 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 mo at 
 BUT 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 Vad been found in Mr. Hamleigh's despatch box,
 
 258 Mount Royal 
 
 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 ; aud which he 
 had occupied at intervals ever since. 
 
 .Mr. Tregonell showed himself keenly anxious that every- 
 thing 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 Koyal. Mr. Biyanstone, the solicitor, a 
 thorough man of the world, and an altogether agreeable per- 
 son, 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 Bos- 
 castle, 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 aud 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 theu 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 grave-digger waa 
 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 heart 
 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 aud 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
 
 'Dust to Dust: 259 
 
 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. 
 lie 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 
 
 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 com- 
 mented between themselves in the seclusion of the smoking 
 room upon the Squire's disinclination to be left without cheerful 
 company. 
 
 1 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 insignifi- 
 cance. ' 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 little too 
 thin. 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
 
 200 Mount Royal. 
 
 twigging that kind of thing, and I'll swear that it was all fail 
 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 
 p'easantly, as he lit his cigarette, and began to smoke, dreamily, 
 daintily, like a man to 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. lie be Laved 
 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 
 ITer 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 Tievena, 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 sutler their son so to perpetuate the name of 
 one who will die childless.'
 
 'Dust to Dust.' 261 
 
 There was an awful silence — perfect collapse on the pari 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. 
 
 1 Am I at liberty to reject that legacy on my son's part 1 ' 
 he asked. 
 
 * Certainly not. The money is left in trust. Your son can 
 do what he iikes when he comes of age. But why should you 
 wish to decline such a legacy — left in such friendly terms 1 Mr. 
 Uamleigh was your friend.' 
 
 ' He was my mother's friend — for me only a recent acquain- 
 tance. 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 1 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 1 ' 
 
 ' 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, 
 .uj 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.' 
 
 1 Then don't you think that respect for your mother may hsyve 
 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
 
 262 Mount Royal. 
 
 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 and that your language and manner are most unbefiting 
 this melancholy occasion.' 
 
 Leonard grumbled an inaudible reply, and walked back to the 
 fire-place. The whole of this conversation had been carried on 
 in undertones — so that the cousins who had gathered in a group 
 upon the hearth-rug, 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 not have 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 check 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 waitings of an approximate character, 
 did Angus Hamleigh's kindred make their lamentation : and then 
 they all began to arrange amoung themselves for getting away aa 
 early as possible next morning— and for travelling together, with 
 a dista it 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, however 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
 
 ' Dust to Dust. 263 
 
 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 Eoyal 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 
 new 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 that 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 Van- 
 deleur ; 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 Eoyal, 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 
 
 ay, strained the child to his breast, and hugged and kissed 
 him with a rough fervour which he had never before shown. 
 The boy quaveredja little, and his lip drooped under that rough. 
 caress — and then the clear blue eyes looked up and saw that this
 
 264 Mount Royal. 
 
 vehemence meant love, and the chubby anas clung closely round 
 the father's neck. 
 
 ' Poor little beggar ! ' muttered Leonard, his eyes clouded 
 frith 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 1 — the wife whom, 
 after the bent of his own nature, he had passionately loved. 
 What could he say to her 1 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 dogcart 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 V 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 hi3 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.
 
 * Pain for thy Girdle, and Sorrow upon thy II cad/ 2(5o 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 ' PAIN FOR THY GIRDLE, AND SORROW UPON THY HEAD.' 
 
 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 lone I v 
 rambles with Miss Bridgeman. The lower part of the house \v;ua 
 given over to silence and emptiness. It was winter, and the 
 roads were not inviting for visitors ; so, after a few calls hail 
 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 nut 
 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
 
 266 Mount Royal. 
 
 younger, fairer face pale as death and inexpressibly sad, and with 
 a look as of one who walks in her sleep, with wide-open, unseen)" 
 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 thorn one day on her way home 
 from Caiuelford 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 M r 
 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 ?ea 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 w r alls 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 gentty 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 consider* 
 able 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,
 
 'Pain for thy Girdle, and Sorroiv upon thy Head. 1 207 
 
 Btralning 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 invita- 
 tion 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 Years 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 Vandeleurs absence. 
 
 ' What a miserable summer it has been,' said Dopsy, yawning 
 and stretching in her tawdry morning gown — one of last years 
 high-art tea gowns — and surveying with despondent eye the 
 barren breakfast-table, where two London eggs, and the re- 
 mains of yesterday's loaf, flanked by a nearly empty marma- 
 lade 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 1 ' 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 
 "mail neat seal ; and the hand which had directed the envelope 
 ..as Uhi Lstabel Tregonell's. 
 
 1 At last she has condescended to write to me with her own 
 hand,' said Dopsy, to whom, as Miss VandeU>ur, the letter wa>
 
 268 Mount Boyal. 
 
 addressed. 'But I dare say it's only a humbugging note. 1 
 know she didn't really like us : we are not her style.' 
 
 'How should we be V exclaimed Mopsy, whom the languid 
 influences of a sultry August had made ill-humoured and cynical. 
 ' She was not brought up in the gutter.' 
 
 ' Mopsy,' cried her sister, with a gasp of surprise and delight, 
 * it's an invitation ! ' 
 
 « What 1 ' 
 
 1 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 1 
 
 ' " Very sincerely yours, 
 
 ' "Ciiristabel 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 1 ' 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 to us. Some- 
 thing might happen — Fortune's wheel might turn in three 
 years.' 
 
 ' Whenever it does turn it will be the wrong way, and we 
 lhall be under it,' said Dopsy, still giving 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 
 
 D 6CGSSltY« 
 
 ' How happy those South Sea Islanders must be,' sighed
 
 ' I will have no Mercy on Him.' 269 
 
 biopsy, pensively meditating upon the difference between weai iug 
 nothing, and having nothing to wear. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIL 
 
 *I WILL HAVE NO MERCY ON HIM.' 
 
 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 serin 
 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 i v , — 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 
 yarted. 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
 
 270 Mount Boyal. 
 
 loved and lie 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 break- 
 fasted 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 winner* 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 th? Mount 1 ' asked Leonard, as Nicholls 
 touched his hat.
 
 •I wilt Tiave no Mercy on Him.' 271 
 
 Yes, sir.' 
 
 He asked for no details, but took the reins from Nfcholla 
 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 horn's' 
 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 gi*ey of early 
 evening. 
 
 ' A good old place, isn't it 1 ' 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 
 gi-im laugh. ' It's a glorious old place, and you needn't apologize 
 for being proud of it. And now we've come back, 1 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 candle-light going to waste,' said Captain Vande- 
 leur. 
 
 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 — ail 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. 
 I£e brushed by them as they grouped themselves about their 
 brother — like a new edition of Laocoon without the sii2js.es, or 
 ■the three Graces without the grace — and hurried into the hall,
 
 272 Mount Royal. 
 
 eager to be face to face with his wife. She came forward tc 
 meet him, looking her loveliest, dressed as he had never seen hei 
 dressed before, with a style, a chic, and a daring more appro- 
 priate to the Theatre Francais 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 Mechlin jabot, 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 ta 
 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, always dans 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, 
 and litterateur, who, five seasons ago, had been an object of 
 undisguised detestation with Christabel. He, too, was essentially 
 in the movement — aesthetic, 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, pro- 
 prietor and editor of The 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 tortis ? 
 Even his placid matter-of-fact speech was, at first, a little dis-
 
 / will have no Mercy on Him. 273 
 
 appointing. It was only h\ 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 annihi- 
 lation. 
 
 There were other guests grouped about the tire-place — little 
 Monty, the useful and good-humoured country-house hack ; 
 Colonel Elathwayt, 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 Mr<5- 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 who 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 hei 
 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 
 si.-ters still entwined about him, still faintly suggestive of that 
 poor man and the sea-serpents. * Would it be too dreadful if I 
 we:e to suggest S. and B. ? ' 
 
 Jessie Bridgeman touched a spring bell on the tea-table, and 
 gave the required order. There was a joviality, laissez-aller in 
 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 
 pori brown and indistinguishable in this doubtful light, 
 
 were all the same. There were no flowers about in tubs or ow 
 tables. That subtle grace— as of a thoughtful woman's hand 
 ruling and arranging everything, artistic even where seeming 
 m < -was missing. Papers, books were thrown 
 
 anyhow up©n the tables ; whips, carriage-raps, wraps, hate,
 
 274 Mount Royal. 
 
 mcumbeied the chairs near the door. Half-a-dozen docw— 
 pointers, setters, cc Hie — sprawled or prowled about the room, 
 fn 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 him as ruach as it perplexed him. 
 
 'Where's the boyT he asked, -exploring the hall and its 
 occupants, with a blank stare. 
 
 ' In his nursery. Where should he be ? ' exclaimed Chris- 
 tabel, 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 
 Madomias, 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. 
 MtzJesse, meekly. 
 
 ' Weak and thin to what he might have written had he 
 known the Pampas,' said the Baron. 
 
 ' You have done the Pampas 1 ' said Mr. FitzJesae.
 
 «Z will have no Mercy on Him.' 275 
 
 ' I have lived amongst wild horses, and wilder humanity, for 
 months at a stretch.' 
 
 ' And you have published a volume of — verses 1 ' 
 
 1 Another of my youthful follies. But I do not place myself 
 upou 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 oi 
 brain-power, an origiual idea is a pearl of price.' 
 
 ' What kind of dogs did you sec in your travels 1 ' asked 
 Emily St. Aubyn, a well-grown upstandiug 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,' 
 '\yawled 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 shuttle- 
 cock conversation — making a mock of most things and most 
 people, t 'nistabel 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 I ' 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. 
 
 4 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 thoroughly chic.' 
 
 * Do you know, I really liked her better last year, when sh? 
 w i frumpy and dowdy,' faltered Dopsy. 'I wasn't able to get 
 on with Ear, 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—
 
 276 Mount Royal. 
 
 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. 
 
 1 How do you like the French Baron 1 ' 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 V 
 
 ' 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. 
 FitzJessie 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 coi'ridor most remote from Christabel's apartments. It 
 communicated with the room Leonard had slept in during hia 
 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 wero henceforth to lead 
 divided liveq T'>e event of last October, his year of absence,
 
 '1 wi'Cl have no Mercy on Him.' 277 
 
 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 hkiself, 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 tided 
 her to the uttermost — and — well — I took my change out cf 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 
 >ilk stockings, and Queen Anne shoes. He was assuredly hand- 
 some — but he had just that style of beauty which to the fasti- 
 dious 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 
 Bheen, odorous of pommade divine, made up the catalogue of his 
 charms. Leonard stood looking at him doubtfully, as if he were 
 ft hitherto unknown animal. 
 
 ' "Where did my wife pick him up, and why V he asked him- 
 self. ' I should have thought he was just the kind of man sha 
 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,' an- 
 swered Leonard, flinging himself into a large arm-chair by the Ihe, 
 and taking up a newspaper. ' Have you been long in the West ' ?
 
 278 Mount Royal. 
 
 1 ALont 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. T 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 foT 
 absolute hardship — the thermometer below zero, a doubtful 
 supply of provisions, pemmican, roasted skunk for supper, with- 
 out 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 subju- 
 gated 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 countessses, 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 smart- 
 ness 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 diamon d
 
 'I will have no Mercy on Him.'' 27^ 
 
 itars in her hair, a style curiously different from those quit-' 
 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, shelter- 
 ing 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 
 vness, 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. Ilam- 
 leigh'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 ae 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 
 Tiave tho wife I had set my heart upon when I was a boy, stolen 
 from me by the first effeminate fopling my silly mother invited
 
 280 tlount Royal. 
 
 to Mount Royal. I had never imagined myself with any othe? 
 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 w; ter, while little Monty discoursed to him, in 
 confidential tonus, 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 imme- 
 diate adjournment to billiards, but, to his surprise, Leonard 
 walked off to the drawing-room. 
 
 ' Aren't you coming 1 ' 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 — 
 a patois song, 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 ki ad 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 
 renienibeioi t>o have heard from her before. The two voices
 
 i will have no Mercy on Him. 281 
 
 harmonized admirably, and there were warm expressions ot 
 delight from the listeners. 
 
 1 Very accomplished man, de Cazalet,' said Colonel Blathwayt; 
 1 uncommonly useful in a country house — sings, and plays, and 
 recites, and acts — rather puify 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 1 ' 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 any- 
 body know anything about him ] ' 
 
 ' He is received in a few houses — rich houses where the 
 hostess goes in for amateur acting and tableaux 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. lie 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 V 
 
 ' 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 con- 
 stitution 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 a prie-dieu chair in a commanding 
 position for the reciter to lean upon gracefully, or hug con- 
 vulsively 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 relation, 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 dis- 
 tinctively 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 Lorrid American have written anything so clever ? _ But then 
 it was Colonel Blathwayt's inimitable elocution which g ave a
 
 282 Mount Royal. 
 
 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 is 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. 
 
 ' Brings the whole thing home to you — makes it ever so 
 much more real, don't you know,' said Mrs. Torrington. 
 
 ' Poor James Lee ! ' sighed Mopsy. 
 
 'Poor Mrs. Lee !' ejaculated Dopsy. 
 
 ' Did he die ? ' asked Miss St. Aubyn. 
 
 ' Did she run away from him 1 ' inquired her sister, the 
 railroad pace at which the Baron fired off the verses having left 
 all those among his hearers who did not know the text in a state 
 of agreeable uncertainty. 
 
 So the night wore on, with more songs and duets from opera 
 and opera-bouffe. No more of Beethoven's grand bursts of 
 melody — now touched with the solemnity of religious feeling — 
 now melting in human pathos — now light and airy, changeful 
 and capricious as the skylark's song— a very fountain of joyous 
 fancies. Mr. Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being 
 indeed, as unmusical a soul as God ever created ; but he thought 
 it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit at her pianc 
 playing an order of music which only the privileged few could 
 understand, than that she should delight the common herd by 
 singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque. 
 
 ' Is she not absolutely delicious 1 ' said Mrs. Torrington, 
 beating time with her fan. ' How proud I should be of myself 
 if I coidd sing like that. How proud you must be of your wife 
 >— such verve — such Han — sc thoroughly in the spirit of tha
 
 *I icill have no Mp* m cy arc Him* 2S3 
 
 thing. Tint is the only kind «i singing anybody really cares 
 for now. Oue goes to the opera to hear them scream through 
 " Loheni'rin " — oi "Tannhauser " — and then one goes into society 
 and talks about Wagner — but it is music like this one enjoys.' 
 
 1 Yes, it's rather jolly,' said Leonard, staring moodily at his 
 wife, in the act of singing a refrain of Be-b6-be, which was 
 supposed to represent the bleating of an innocent lamb. 
 
 And the Baron's voice goes so admirably with Mrs 
 TregonelPs.' 
 
 1 Yes, his voice goes— admirably,' said Leonard, sorely 
 tempted to blaspheme. 
 
 ' Weren't you charmed to find us all so gay and bright here — 
 nothing to suggest the sad break-up you had last year. I felt so 
 intensely sorry for you all — yet I was selfish enough to be glad 
 I had left before it happened. Did they — don't think me morbid 
 for asking — did they bring him home here ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, they brought him home.' 
 
 'And in which room did they put him? One always wants 
 to know these things, though it can do one no good.' 
 
 ' In the Blue Room.' 
 
 'The second from the end of the corridor, next but one t< > 
 mine ; that's rather awfully near. Do you believe in spiritual 
 influences? Have you ever had a revelation? Good gracious? 
 is it really so late ? Everybody seems to be going.' 
 
 ' Let me get your candle,' said Leonard, eagerly, making a 
 dash for the hall. And so ended his first evening at home with 
 that imbecile refrain — B e-be-be, repeating itself in his ears. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVILL 
 
 ' GAI DONC, LA VOYAGEUSE, AU COUP DU PELERIN ! ' 
 
 When Mr. Tregonell came to the breakfast room next morning 
 he found everybody alert with the stir and expectation of an 
 agreeable day. The Trevena harriers were to meet for the first 
 time this season, and everybody was full of that event. Chris- 
 tabel, Mrs. Torrington, and the St. Aubyu girls were breakfasting 
 in their habits and hats : whips and gloves were lying about on 
 chairs and side-tables — everybody was talking, and everybody 
 seemed in a hurry. De Cazalet looked gorgeous in olive corduroy 
 and Newmarket boots. Mr. St. Aubyn looked business-like in 
 a well-worn red coat and mahogany tops, while the other men 
 inclined to dark shooting jackets, buckskins, and Napoleons 
 Mr. FitzJesse, in a morning suit that savoured of the studv 
 ratht-r than the hunting field, contemplated these Nimrods with 
 an amuscii entile ; but the Reverend St. Bernard beheld them 
 not without pangs of envy. He, too, had been ir. Arcadia ; he,
 
 34 Mount Roy at. 
 
 <o, had followed the hounds in his green Oxford days, before 
 i joined that band of young Anglicans who he doubted not 
 ould by-and-by be aa widely renowned as the heroes of the 
 ractarian movement. 
 
 ' You are going to the meet ? ' inquired Leonard, as his wife 
 aided him his coflee. 
 
 ' Do you think I would take the trouble to put on my habit 
 i order to ride from here to Trevena 1 ' exclaimed Christabel. 
 [ am going with the rest of them, of course. Emily St. Aubyn 
 ill show me the way.' 
 
 ' But you have never hunted.' 
 
 ' Because your dear mother was too nervous to allow me. 
 ' ut I have ridden over every inch of the ground. I know my 
 irse, and my horse knows me. You needn't be afraid.' 
 
 ' Mrs. Tregonell is one of the finest horsewomen I ever saw,' 
 id de Cazalet. 'It is a delight to ride by her side. Are not 
 >u coming with us ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' Yes, I'll ride after you,' said Leonard. ' I forgot all about 
 e harriers. Nobody told me they were to begin work thia 
 orning.' 
 
 The horses were brought round to the porch, the ladies put 
 t their gloves, and adjusted themselves in those skimpy lop- 
 led petticoats which have replaced the flowing drapery of the 
 .rk ages when a horsewoman's legs and boots were in some- 
 ise a mystery to the outside world. 
 
 Leonard went out to look at the horses. A strange horse 
 ould have interested him even on his death bed, while one ray 
 consciousness yet remained to recognize the degrees of equine 
 rength and quality. He overhauled the mare which Major 
 •ee had chosen for Christabel a month ago — a magnilicent 
 ree-quarter bred hunter, full of power. 
 
 ' Do you think she can carry me ? ' asked Christabel. 
 
 ' She could carry a house. Yes ; you ought to be safe upon 
 :r. Is that big black brute the Baron's horse 1 ' 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 ' I thought^ so — a coarse clumsy beast, all show,' muttered 
 eonard : ' like master, like man.' 
 
 He turned away to examine Colonel Blathwayt's hunter, a 
 >od looking chestnut, and in that moment the Baron had taken 
 p his ground by Christabel's mare, and was ready to lift her 
 .to the saddle. She went up as lightly as a shuttlecock from 
 
 battledore, scarcely touching the corduroy shoulder — but 
 eonard felt angry with the Baron for usurping a function 
 hich should have been left for the husband. 
 
 ' Is Betsy Baker in condition 1 ' he asked the head groom, ai 
 ie party rode away, de Cazalet on Mrs. Tregonell's right hand. 
 
 < Splendid, sir. She only wants work.' 
 
 'Gtet her ready as quick as you can I'll take it out of her.' 
 
 Mr. Tregonell kept his word. Wherever de Cazalet and
 
 ' Gai Done, La Voyageuse, Au Coup Du Pelerin ! ' 2S~ 
 
 Christahel rode that day, ChiTstabel's husband wont with th*nj 
 The Baron was a bold, bad rider — reckless of himself, brutal U 
 his horse. Christabel rode superbly, and was superbly mounted. 
 Those hills which seemed murderous to the stranger, were as 
 nothing to her, -who had galloped up and down them on her 
 Shetland pony, and had seldom ridden over better ground from 
 the time when Major Bree first took her out with a leadingrein. 
 The day was long, and there was plenty of fast going — but these 
 three were always in the front. Yet even the husband's 
 immediate neighbourhood in no wise lessened the Baron's 
 marked attention to the wife, and Leonard rode homeward pt 
 dusk sorely troubled in spirit. "What did it mean 1 Could it 
 be that she, whose conduct last year had seemed without 
 reproach ; who had borne herself with matronly dignity, with 
 virginal purity towards the lover of her girlhood— the refined 
 and accomplished Angus Hamleigh — could it be that she had 
 allowed herself to be involved in a flirtation with such a tinsel 
 dandy as this de Cazalet ? 
 
 ' It would be sheer lunacy,' he said to himself. 'Perhaps she 
 is carrying on like this to annoy me — punishing me for ' 
 
 He rode home a little way behind those other two, full of 
 vexation and bewilderment. Nothing had happened of which 
 he could reasonably complain. He could scarcely kick this man 
 out of his house 1 lecause he inclined his head at a certain angle — 01 
 because be dropped his voice to a lower key when he spoke to 
 ( hristabel. Yet his very attitude in the saddle as he rode on 
 ahead — his hand on his horse's flank, his figure turned towards 
 Christabel — wfte a provocation. 
 
 Opera bouffe duets — recitations — acting charades — bouts rimes 
 — all the catalogue of grown-up playfulness — began again after 
 dinner ; but this evening Leonard did not stay in the drawing- 
 room. He felt that he could not trust himself. His disgust 
 must needs explode into some rudeness of speech if he remained 
 to witness these vagaries. 
 
 ' I like the society of barmaids, and I can tolerate the com- 
 pany of ladies,' he said to his bosom friend Jack ; but a mixture 
 of the two is unendurable : so we'll have a good smoke and half- 
 crown pool, shilling lives.' 
 
 This was as much as to say, that Leonard and his other 
 fm nds were about to render their half-crowns and shillings 
 as tribute to Captain Vandeleur's superior play ; that gentleman 
 having made pool his profession since he left the army. 
 
 They played till midnight, in an atmosphere which grew 
 thick with tobacco smoke before the night was done. They 
 played till Jack Vandeleur's pockets were full of loose silver, and 
 till the other men had come to the conclusion that pool was a 
 slow game, with an element of childishness in it, at, the best- -no 
 real skiii, only a mere mechanical knack, acquired by incessant 
 pi t ice in fusty puUH-i rooms, reeking vrU u alcohol.
 
 286 Moun* Boyav. 
 
 'Show me a man who plays like th;rt, and I'll show yon & 
 scamp,' muttered little Monty in a friendly aside to Leonard* at 
 Jack Vandeleur swept up the last pool. 
 
 *• I know he's a scamp,' answered Leonard, 'but he's a pleasant 
 reamp, and a capital fellow to trave.l with — never ill — never out 
 »f temper — always ready for the day's work, whatever it is, and 
 always able to make the best of things. Why dou't you marry 
 one of his sisters 1 — they're both jolly good fellows.' 
 
 ' No coin,' said Monty, shaking his neat little flaxen head. 
 ' I can just contrive to keep myself — "still to be neat, still to be 
 drest." What in mercy's name should I do with a wife who 
 would want food and gowns, and stalls at the theatres ? I have 
 been thinking that if those St. Aubyn girls have money — on the 
 nail, you know, uot in the form of expectations from that pain- 
 fully healthy father — I might think seriously of one of them. 
 They are horridly rustic — smell of clover and beans, and would 
 be likely to disgrace one in London society — but they are not 
 hideous.' 
 
 ' I don't think there's much ready money in that quarter, 
 Monty,' answered Leonard. ' St. Aubyn has a good deal of land.' 
 
 'Land,' screamed Monty. ' I wouldn't touch it with a pair 
 of tongs ! The workhouses of the next century will be peopled 
 by the offspring of the landed gentry. I shudder when I think 
 of the country squire and his prospects.' 
 
 'Hard lines,' said Jack, who had made that remark two or 
 three times before in the course of the evening. 
 
 They were silting round the fire by this time — smoking and 
 drinking mulled Burgundy, and the conversation had become 
 general. 
 
 This night was as many other nights. Sometimes Mr. 
 Tregonell tried to live through the evening in the drawing-room 
 — enduring the society games — the Boulevard music — the reci- 
 tations and tableaux and general frivolity — but he found these 
 amusements hang upon his spirits like a nightmare. He watched 
 his wife, but could discover nothing actually reprehensible in her 
 conduct — nothing upon which he could take his stand as an 
 outraged husband and say ' This shall not be.' If the Baron's 
 devotion to her was marked enough for every one to see, and if 
 her acceptance of his attentions was gracioi*? in the ext enie, his 
 devotion and her graciousness were no more than he had seen 
 everywhere accepted as the small change of society, meaning 
 nothing, tending towards nothing but gradual satiety ; except in 
 those few exceptional cases which ended in open scandal and 
 took society by surprise. That which impressed Leonard was 
 the utter change in his wife's character. It seemed as if her 
 very nature were altered. Womanly tenderness, a gentle and 
 subdued manner, had given place to a hard brilliancy. It was, 
 as if he had lost a pearl, and found a diamond in its place — one 
 all softness and purity, the other all sparkle and light.
 
 * Gai Done, La Voyageuse, Au Coup Du Pelerinf 287 
 
 He was too proud to sue to her for any renewal of old confi- 
 dences — to claim from her any of the duties of a wife. If she 
 could live and be happy -without him — and he knew but too 
 surely tlrat his presence, his affection, had never contributed to 
 her happiness — he would let her see that he could live without 
 her — that he was content to accept the position she had chosen — 
 union which was no union — marriage that had ceased to bo 
 marriage — a chain drawn out to its furthest length, yet held 6<j 
 lightly that neither need feel the bondage. 
 
 Everybody at Mount Royal was loud in praise of Christabel. 
 She was so brilliant, so versatile, she made her house so utterly 
 charming. This was the verdict of her new friends — but her 
 old friends were less enthusiastic. Major Bree came to the 
 Manor House very seldom now, and frankly owned himself a 
 fish out of water in Mrs. Tregonell's new circle. 
 
 ' Everybody is so laboriously lively,' he said ; ' there is an 
 air of forced hilarity. I sigh for the house as it was in your 
 mother's time, Leonard. " A haunt of ancient peace." ' 
 
 'There's not much peace about it now, by Jove,' said 
 Leonard. ' Why did you put it into my wife's head to ride to 
 hounds 1 ' 
 
 ' I had nothing to do with it. She asked me to choose her a 
 hunter, and I chose her something good and safe, that's all 
 But I don't think you ought to object to her hunting, Leonard, 
 or to her doing anything else that may help to keep her in good 
 spirits. She was in a very bad way all the winter.' 
 
 ' Do you mean that she was seriously ill ? Their letters to 
 
 me were so d d short. I hardly know anything that went on 
 
 while I was away.' 
 
 ' Yes. She was very ill — given over to melancholy. It was 
 only natural that she should be affected by Angus Hamleigh'a 
 death, when you remember what they had been to each other 
 before you came home. A woman may break an engagement of 
 that kind, and may be very happy in her union with another 
 man, but she can't forget her first lover, if it were only because 
 he is the first. It was an unlucky thing your bringing him to 
 Mount Royal. One of your impulsive follies.' 
 
 ' Yes, one of my follies. So you say that Christabel was out 
 of health and spirits all the winter.' 
 
 ' Yes, she would see no one — not even me — or the Rector. 
 N'> one but the doctor ever crossed the threshold. But suiely 
 Miss Bridgeman has told you all about it. Miss Bridgeman was 
 de ■■ i ted to her.' 
 
 ' M iss Bridgeman is as close as the grave ; and I am not going 
 to i! i elf by questioning her.' 
 
 1 Well, there is no need to be unhappy about the past, 
 herself again, thank God bi 
 That Swiss tour with Miss Bridgeman and the boy did 
 1 w< rlda of good. 1 thought you made a mistake in leaving
 
 288 Mount Boy at. 
 
 her at Mount Royal after that melancholy event. Yon should 
 have taken her with you.' 
 
 ' Perhaps I ought to have done so,' assented Leonard, think- 
 ing bitterly how very improbable it was that she would have 
 consented to go with him. 
 
 He tried to make the best of his position, painful as it was. 
 He blustered and hectored as of old — gave his days to field 
 sports — his evenings for the most part to billiards and tobacco. 
 He drank more than he had been accustomed to drink, sat np late 
 of nights. His nerves were not benefited by these latter habits. 
 
 ' "Sour hand is as shaky as an old woman's,' exclaimed Jack, 
 upon his opponent missing an easy cannon. 'Why, you might 
 have done that with a boot jack. If you're not careful you'll be 
 in for an attack of del. trem., and that will chaw you up in a 
 very short time. A man of your stamina is the worst kind of 
 subject for nervous diseases. We shall have you catching flies, 
 and seeing imaginary snow-storms before long.' 
 
 Leonard received this friendly warning with a scornful laugh. 
 
 'De Cazalet drinks more, brandy in a day than I do in a 
 week,' he said. 
 
 'Ah, but look at his advantages — brought up in Jersey, 
 where cognac is duty-free. None of us have had his fine training. 
 Wonderful constitution he must have — hand as steady as a rock. 
 You saw him this morning knock off a particular acorn from the 
 oak in the stable yard with a bullet.' 
 
 ' Yes, the fellow can shoot ; he's less of an impostor than I 
 expected.' 
 
 ' Wonderful eye and hand. He must have spent years of his 
 life in a shooting gallery. You're a dooced good shot, Tregonell ; 
 but, compared with him, you're not -in it.' 
 
 ' That's very likely, though I have had to live by my gun in 
 the Rockies. FitzJesse told me that in South America de Cazalet 
 was known as a professed duellist.' 
 
 ' And you have only shot four-footed beasts — never gone for 
 a fellow creature,' answered Jack, lightly. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 ' TIME TURNS THE OLD DAYS TO DERISION.' 
 
 If Leonard Tregonell was troubled and perplexed by the change 
 in his wife's character, there was one other person at Moun 
 Royal, Christabel's nearest and dearest friend, to whom that 
 change was even a greater mystification. Jessie Bridgeman, 
 who had been with her in the dark hours of her grief— who had 
 Been her sunk in the apathy of despair — who had comforted and 
 watched her, and sympathized and wept with her, looked on 
 now in blank wonderment at a phase cf character which was 
 altogeth er enigmatical. She ^h<* been with Mrs. Tregonell *.t
 
 'Time Turns the Old Days to Derision.' 280 
 
 Zermatt, when de Cazalet had obtruded himself on their notice 
 bv his officious attentions during a pilgrimage to the Eiffel, and 
 Bhe had been bewildered at Christabel's civility to a man of such 
 obvious bad style. He had stayed at the same hotel with them 
 for three or four days, and had given them as much of his society 
 as he could without being absolutely intrusive, taking advantage 
 of having met Christabel five seasons ago, at two or three quasi 
 literary assemblies ; and at parting Christabel had invited him 
 to Mount Royal. 'Mr. Tregonell will be at home in the autumn,' 
 she said, ' and if you should find yourself in Cornwall ' — he had 
 talked of exploring the "West of England — ' I know he would be 
 glad to see you at Mount EoyaL' 
 
 When Jessie hinted at the unwisdom of an invitation to a 
 maD of whom they knew so little, Christabel answered carelessly 
 that ' Leonard liked to have his house full of lively people, and 
 would no doubt be pleased with the Baron de Cazalet.' 
 1 You used to leave him to choose his own visitors.' 
 ' I know ; but I mean to take a more active part in Lie 
 arrangement of things in future. I am tired of being a cipher.' 
 ' Did you hear those people talking of the Baron at table d'hote 
 yesterday ? ' 
 
 ' I heard a little — I was not particularly attentive.' 
 'Then perhaps you did not hear that he is a thorough 
 Bohemian — that he led a very wild life in South America, and 
 was a notorious duellist.' 
 
 ' What can that matter to us, even if it is true V 
 It seemed to Jessie that Christabel's whole nature underwent 
 a change, and that the transformation dated from her acquaint- 
 ance with this man. They were at the end of their tour at the 
 time of this meeting, and they came straight through to Paris, 
 where Mrs. Tregonell abandoned herself to frivolity — going to 
 all the theatres — buying all the newest and lightest music — 
 spending long mornings with milliners and dressmakers — 
 equandering money upon fine rlothes, which a year ago she 
 would have scorned to wear. Hitherto her taste had tended to 
 simplicity of attire — not without richness — for she was too much 
 of an artist not to value the artistic effects of costly fabrics, he 
 beauty of warm colouring. But she now pursued that Will o' the 
 Wisp fashion from Worth to Pingat, and bought any number of 
 gowns, some of which, to Miss Bridgeman's severe taste, seemed 
 simply odious. 
 
 ' Do you intend spending next season in May Fair, and do 
 you expect to be asked to a good many fancy balls V asked 
 ", as Mrs. Tregonell's maid exhibited the gowns in the 
 spacious bed-room at the Bristol. 
 
 ressie. These are all dinner gowns. Them 1 ' 
 variety of modern fashion is its chief merit. The style of to-day 
 embraces three centuries of the past, from Catherine de Med>'-'- 
 to Madame Rccamier.'
 
 290 Mount Royal. 
 
 At one of the Boulevard theatres Mrs. Tregoncll and Mis. 
 Bridgeman met Mr. FitzJesse, who was also returning from a 
 summer holiday. He was Angus Hamleigh's friend, and had 
 known Christabel during the happy days of her first London 
 season. It seemed hardly strange that she should be glad to 
 meet him, and that she should ask him to Mount Eoyal. 
 
 And now I must have some women to meet these men,' she 
 said, when she and Jessie were at home again, and the travelled 
 infant had gone back to his nursery, and had inquired why the 
 hills he saw from his windows were no longer white, and why 
 the sea was so much bigger than the lakes he had seen lately. 
 ' I mean to make the house as pleasant as possible for Leonard 
 when he comes home.' 
 
 She and Jessie were alone in the oak-panelled parlour — the 
 room with the alcove overlooking the hills and the sea. They 
 were seated at a little table in this recess — Christabel's desk open 
 before her — Jessie knitting. 
 
 1 How gaily you speak. Have you ' 
 
 She was going to say, ' Have you forgiven him lor what was 
 done at St. Nectan's Kieve?' but she checked herself when the 
 words were on her lips. What if Leonard's crime was not for- 
 given, but forgetten ? In that long dreary winter they had 
 never spoken of the manner of Angus Hamleigh's death. Chris - 
 tabel's despair had been silent. Jessie had comforted her with 
 vague words which never touched upon the cruel details of her 
 grief. How if the mind had been affected by that long interval 
 of sorrow and the memory of Leonard's 'deed blotted out? 
 Christabel's new delight in frivolous things— her sudden fancy 
 for filling her house with lively people— might be the awakening 
 of new life and vigour in a mind that had trembled on the con^ 
 fines of madness. Was it for her to recall bitter facts — to reopen the 
 fountain of tears 1 She gave one little sigh for the untimely dead 
 »—and then addressed herself to the duty of pleasing Christabel, 
 just as in days gone by her every effort had been devoted to 
 making the elder Mrs. Tregonell happy. 
 
 ' I suppose you had better ask Mrs. Fairfax Torrington,' she 
 suggested. 
 
 ' Yes, Leonard and she are great chums. We must have 
 Mrs. Torrington. And there are the St. Aubyns, nice lively 
 girls, and an inoffensive father and mother. I believe Leonard 
 rather likes them. And then it will be a charity to have Dopsy 
 and Mopsy.' 
 
 ' I thought you detested them.' 
 
 ' No, poor foolish things — I was once sorry for Dopsy.' The 
 tears rushed to her eyes. She rose suddenly from her chair, and 
 went to the window. 
 
 ' Then she has not forgotten,' thought Jessie. 
 
 So it was that the autumn party was planned. Mr. Faddie 
 ^as doing duty at the little church in the glen, and thus
 
 ' Tone Turns the Old Days to Derision. 29 1 
 
 happened to be in the way of an invitation. Mr. Montagu was 
 asked as a person of general usefulness. The St. Aubyn party 
 brought horses, and men and maids, and contributed much to 
 the liveliness of the establishment, so far as noise means gaiety. 
 They were all assembled when Baron de Cazalet telegraphed from 
 a yacht off the.Lizard to ask if he might come, and, receivingafavour- 
 able reply, lauded at Penzance, and posted over with his valet ; his 
 horse and gun cases were brought from London by another servant. 
 
 Leonard had been home nearly a fortnight, and had begun 
 to accept this new mode of life without further wonder, and to 
 fall into his old ways, and find some degree of pleasure in his old 
 occupations — hunting, shooting. 
 
 The Vandeleur girls were draining the cup of pleasure to 
 the dregs. Dopsy forgot her failure and grief of last year. One 
 cannot waste all one's life in mourning for a lover who waa 
 never in love with one. 
 
 ' I wore bugles for him all last winter, and if I had been able 
 to buy a new black gown I would have kept in mourning for 
 six months,' she told her sister apologetically, as if ashamed of 
 her good spirits, 'but I can't help enjoying myself in such a 
 house as this. Is not Mr° Tregonell changed for the better V 
 
 ' Everything is change for the better,' assented Mopsy. 
 ' If we had only horses and could hunt, like those stuck up St. 
 Aubyn girls, life would be perfect.' 
 
 ' They ride well, I suppose,' said Dopsy, ' but they are dread- 
 fully arricrces. They haven't an aesthetic idea. When I told 
 them we had thoughts of belonging to the Browning Society, that 
 eldest one asked me if it was like the Birkbeek, and if we should 
 be able to buya house rentfree by monthly instalments. And the 
 youngest said that sunflowers were only fit for cottage gardens.' 
 
 'And the narrow-minded mother declared she could se3 no 
 beauty in single dahlias,' added Dopsy, with ineffable disgust. 
 
 The day was hopelessly wet, and the visitors at Mount Royal 
 were spending the morning in that somewhat straggling manner 
 common to people who are in somebody else's house — impressed 
 with a feeling that it is useless to settle oneself even to the 
 interesting labour of art needlework when one is not by one's 
 own fireside. The sportsmen were all out ; but de Cazalet, the 
 Rev. St. Bernard, and Mr. FitzJesse preferred the shelter of a 
 well-wanned Jacobean mansion to the wild sweep of the wind 
 across the moor, or the dash of the billows. 
 
 ' I have had plenty of wild life on the shores of the Pacific,' 
 Baid de Cazalet, luxuriating in a large green plush arm-chair, our, 
 of the anachroni ra i of the grave old binary. ' At home I revel 
 in civilization — I cannot have too much of warmth i.nd 
 comfort — velvety nests like this to lounge in, downy cushions to 
 lean against, ho1 house flowers, and French cookery. Delicious 1 1 
 bearlhe rain beating against the glass, and the wind howling in the 
 chimney. Put another log on Faddie. like the best of fellows.'
 
 392 Mount Royal. 
 
 The Reverend St. Bernard, not much appreciating this 
 familiarity, daintily picked a log from the big brazen basket 
 and dropped it in a gingerly manner upon the hearth, carefully 
 dusting his fingers afterwards with a cambric handkerchief 
 tvhich sent forth odours of Marechale. 
 
 Mr. FitzJesse was sitting at a distant table, with a large 
 despatch box and a pile of open letters before him, writing at 
 railway speed, in order to be in time for the one o'clock post. 
 
 'He is making up his paper,' said de Cazalet, lazily contem- 
 plating the worker's bowed shoulders. ' I wonder if he is saying 
 anything about us.' 
 
 ' 1 am happy to say that he does not often discuss church 
 tiatteis,' said Mr. Faddie. ' He shows his good sense by a 
 eareful avoidance of opinion upon our difficulties and our 
 differences.' 
 
 ' Perhaps he doesn't think them worth discussing-^of no more 
 consequence than the shades of difference between tweedledum 
 and twedledee,' yawned de Cazalet, whereupon Mr. Faddie gave 
 him a look of contemptuous anger, and left the room. 
 
 Mr. FitzJesse went away soon afterwards with his batch of 
 letters for the post-bag in the hall, and the Baron was left alone 
 in listless contemplation of the fire. He had been in the drawing 
 room, but had found that apartment uninteresting by reason of 
 Mrs. Tregonell's absence. He did not care to sit and watch 
 the two Miss St. Aubyns playing chess — nor to hear Mrs. Fairfax 
 Torrington dribbling out stray paragraphs from the 'society 
 journals ' for the benefit of nobody in particular — nor to listen 
 to Mrs. St. Aubyn's disquisitions upon the merits of Alderney 
 cows, with which Jessie Bridgeman made believe to be 
 interested, while deep in the intricacies of a crewel-work dafibdiL 
 For him the spacious pink and white panelled room without one 
 particular person was more desolate than the wild expanse of 
 the Pampas, with its low undlations, growing rougher towards 
 the base of the mountains. He had come to the library — an 
 apartment chiefly used by the men — to bask in the light of the 
 fire, and to brood upon agreeable thoughts. The meditations of 
 a man who has a very high opinion of his own merits are 
 generally pleasant, and just now Oliver de Cazalet's idea about 
 himself were unusually exalted, for had he not obviously made 
 \he conquest of one of the most charming women he had 
 ever met. 
 
 'A pity she has a husband,' he thought. 'It would have 
 suited me remarkably well to drop into such a luxurious nest as 
 this. The boy is not three years old — by the time he came of 
 age — well — I should have lived my life, I suppose, and could 
 afford to subside into comfortable obscurity,' sighed de Cazalet; 
 conscious of his forty years. ' The husband looks uncommonly 
 tough ; but even Hercules was mortal. One never knows how 
 or when a man of that stamp may go off the hooks,'
 
 Time Turns the. Old Bays to Derision.' 293 
 
 Itit-^e pleasing reflections were disturbed by the entrance of 
 Mopsy, who, after prowling all over the hous* in quest of mas- 
 culine society, came yawning into the library in search of any- 
 thing readable in the way of a newspaper — a readable paper 
 with Mopsy meaning theatres, fashions, or scandal. 
 
 She gave a little start at sight of de Cazalet, whose stalwart 
 form and florid good looks were by no means obnoxious to her 
 taste. If he had not been so evidently devoted to Mrs. Tregonell, 
 Mopsy would have perchance essayed his subjugation ; but, re- 
 membering Dopsy's bitter experience of last year, the saddor and 
 wiser Miss Vandeleur had made up her mind not to 'go for' any 
 marriageable man in too distinct a manner. She would play 
 that fluking game which she most affected at billiards — sending 
 her ball spinning all over the table with the hope that some 
 successfnl result must come of a vigorous stroke. 
 
 She fluttered about the room, then stopped in a Fra Angelico 
 pose over a table strewed with papers. 
 
 'Baron, have you seen the Queen?' she asked presently. 
 
 'Often. I had the honour of making my bow to her last 
 April. She is one of the dearest women I know, and she was 
 good enough to feel interested in my somewhat romantic career.' 
 
 ' How nice ! But I mean the Queen newspaper. I am dying 
 to know if it really is coming in. Now it has been seen in Paris, 
 I'm afraid it's inevitable.' 
 
 ' May I ask what it is 1 ' 
 
 1 Perhaps I oughtn't to mention it — crinoline. There is a talk 
 about something called a crinolette.' 
 
 ' And Crinolette, I suppose, is own sister to Crinoline ! ' 
 
 ' I'm afraid so — don't you hate them ? I do ; I love the early 
 Italian style — clinging cashmeres, soft flowing draperies.' 
 
 ' And accentuated angles — well, yes. If one has to ride in 
 a hansom or a single brougham with a woman the hoop and 
 powder style is rather a burthen. But women are such lovely 
 beings — they are adorable in any costume. Madame Tallien 
 with bare feet, and no petticoats to speak of — Pompadour in 
 patches and wide-spreading brocade — Margaret of Orleans in a 
 peaked head dress and puffed sleeves — Mary Stuart in a black 
 velvet coif, and a ruff — each and all adorable — on a pretty 
 woman.' 
 
 ' On a pretty woman — yes. The pretty women set the fashions 
 and the ugly women have to wear them — that's the difficulty.' 
 
 ' Ah, me,' sighed the Baron, ' did any one ever see an ugly 
 woman ? There are so many degrees of beauty that it takes a 
 long time to get from Venus to her opposite. A smile — a sparkle 
 — a kindly look — a fresh complexion — a neat bonnet — vivacious 
 conversation — such trifles will pass for beauty with a man who 
 worships the sex. For him every flower in the garden of woman- 
 hood, from the imperial rose to the lowly buttercup, has its own 
 Decuiiar charm.'
 
 294 Mount Boyah 
 
 ' And yet I should have thought you were awfully fastidious, 
 said Mopsy, trilling with the newspapers, *<*nd that nothing 
 short of absolute perfection would please you.' 
 
 ' Absolute perfection is generally a bore. I have met famous 
 beauties who had no more attraction than if they had beeu 
 famous statues.' 
 
 ' Yes ; I know there is a cold kind of beauty — but there are 
 women who are as fascinating as they are lovely. Our hostess, 
 for instance — don't you think her utterly sweet? ' 
 
 ' She is very lovely. Do come and sit by the fire. It is such 
 a creepy morning. I'll hunt for any newspapers you like 
 presently ; but in the meanwhile let us chat. I was getting 
 horribly tired of my own thoughts when you came in.' 
 
 Mopsy simpered, and sat down in the easy chair opposite the 
 Baron's. She began to think that this delightful person admired 
 her more than she had hitherto supposed. His desire for her 
 company looked promising. What if, after all, she, who had 
 striven so much less eagerly than poor Dopsy strove last year, 
 should be on the high road to a conquest. Here was the 
 handsomest man she had ever met, a man with title and money, 
 courting her society in a house full of people. 
 
 ' Yes, she is altogether charming,' said the Baron lazily, as if 
 he were talking merely for the sake of conversation. ' Very 
 sweety as you say, but not quite my style — there is a something 
 — an intangible something wanting. ' She has chic — she has 
 savoir-faire, but she has not — no, she has not that electrical wit 
 which — I have admired in others less conventionally beautiful.' 
 
 The Baron's half-veiled smile, a smile glancing from under 
 lowered eyelids, hinted that this vital spark which was wanting 
 in Christabel might be found in Mopsy. 
 
 The damsel blushed, and looked down conscious of eyelashes 
 artistically treated. 
 
 ' I don't think Mrs. Tregonell has been quite happy in her 
 married life,' said Mopsy. ' My brother and Mr. Tregonell are 
 very old friends, don't you know ; like brothers, in fact ; and 
 Mr. Tregonell tells Jack everything. I know his cousin didn't 
 want to marry him — she was engaged to somebody else, don't 
 ou know, and that engagement was broken off, but he had set 
 is heart upon marrying her — and his mother had set her heart 
 upon the match — and between them they talked her into it. 
 She never really wanted to marry him — Leonard has owned 
 that to Jack in his savage moods. But I ought not to run ou so 
 — I am doing very wrong' — said Mopsy, hastily. 
 
 ' You may say anything you please to me. I am like tha 
 grave. I never give up a secret,' said the Baron, who had 
 settled himself comfortably in his chair, assured that Mopsy 
 once set going, would tell him all she could tell. 
 
 1 No, I don't believe — from what Jack says hp savs in hia 
 tempers— I don't believe she ever liked him,' pursued Mops.y. 
 
 E
 
 ' Time Turns tlie Old Days to Derision.' % /i)o 
 
 'And she was desperately in love with the other one. But she 
 s;ave him up at her aunt's instigation, because of some early 
 intrigue of his — which was absurd, as she would have known, 
 poor thing, if she had not been brought up in this out-of-the-way 
 corner of the world.' 
 
 ' The other one. Who was the other one ? ' asked the Baron. 
 
 'The man who was shot at St. Nectan's Kieve last year. 
 You must have heard the story.' 
 
 ' Yes ; Mr. St. Aubyn told me about it. And this Mr. 
 Hamleigh had been engaged to Mrs. Tregonell 1 Odd that he 
 should be staying in this house ! ' 
 
 ' Wasn't it ? One of those odd things that Leonard Tregonell 
 is fond of doing. He was always eccentric. 
 
 ' And during this visit was there anything — the best of women 
 are mortal — was there anything in the way of a flirtation going 
 on between Mrs. Tregonell and her former sweetheart 1 ' 
 
 ' Not a shadow of impropriety,' answered Mopsy heartily. 
 1 She behaved perf ectly. I knew the story from my brother, and 
 couldn't help watching them — there was nothing underhand — not 
 the faintest indication of a secret understanding between them.' 
 
 ' xind Mr. Tregonell was not jealous ? ' 
 
 ' I cannot say ; but I am sure he had no cause.' 
 
 1 1 suppose Mrs. Tregonell was deeply affected by Mr. Ham- 
 leigh's death ? ' 
 
 ' I hardly know. She seemed wonderfully calm ; but as we 
 left almost immediately after the accident I had not much 
 opportunity of judging.' 
 
 ' A sad business. A lovely woman married to a man she 
 does not care for — and really if I were not a visitor under his 
 roof I should be tempted to say that in my opinion no woman 
 in her senses could care for Mr. Tregonell. But I suppose after 
 all practical considerations had something to do with the match. 
 Tregouell is lord of half-a-dozen manors — and the lady hadn't 
 a sixpence. Was that it ? ' 
 
 'Not at alL Mrs. Tregonell has money in her own right 
 She was the only child of an Indian judge, and her mother was 
 co-heiress with the late Mrs. Tregonell, who was a Miss Cham- 
 peruowne — I believe she has at least fifteen hundred a year, 
 upon which a single woman might live very comfortably, don't 
 you know,' concluded Miss Vandeleur, with a grand air. 
 
 ' No doubt,' said the Baron. ' And the fortune was settled 
 on herself, I conclude 1 ' 
 
 ' Every shilling. Mr. Tregonell's mother insisted upon that. 
 No doubt she felt it her duty to protect her niece's interest. 
 Mr. Tregonell has complained to Jack of his wife being so 
 independent. It lessens his hold upon her, don't you see.' 
 
 ' Naturally. She is not under any obligation to him for her 
 milliner's bills.' 
 
 'No. And her bills must be awfully heavy this year. I
 
 29b Mount Royal. 
 
 never saw such a change in any one. Last autumn she dressed 
 so simply. A tailor-gown in the morning — black velvet or sal iu 
 in the evening. And now there is no end to the variety of her 
 gowns. It makes one feel awfully shabby.' 
 
 ' Such artistic toilets as yours can never be shabby,' said the 
 Baron. ' In looking at a picture by Greuze one does not think 
 how much a yard the pale indefinite drapery cost, one only sees 
 the grace and beauty of the draping.' 
 
 ' True ; taste will go a long way,' assented Mopsy, who had 
 
 been trying for the last ten years to make taste — that is to say 
 
 a careful study of the West-end shop windows — do duty for cash 
 
 ' Then you find Mrs. Tregonell changed since your last visit 1 
 
 inquired de Cazalet, bent upon learning all he could. 
 
 ' Remarkably. She is so much livelier — she seems so much 
 more anxious to please. It is a change altogether for the better. 
 She seems gayer — brighter — happier.' 
 
 ' Yes,' thought the Baron, ' she is in love. Only one 
 magician works such wonders, and he is the oldest of the gods 
 — the motive power of the universe.' 
 
 The gong sounded, and they went off to lunch. At the foot 
 of the stairs they met Christabel bringing down her boy. She 
 was not so devoted to him as she had been last year, but there 
 were occasions — like this wet morning, for instance — when she 
 gave herself up to his society. 
 
 ' Leo is going to eat his dinner with us,' she said, smiling at 
 the Baron, ' if you will not think him a nuisance.' 
 
 ' On the contrary, I shall be charmed to improve his acquaint- 
 ance. I hope he will let me sit next him.' 
 
 ' Thant,' lisped Leo,' decisively. ' Don't like oo.' 
 ' Oh, Leo, how rude.' 
 
 ' Don't reprove him,' said the Baron. ' It is a comfort to be 
 reminded that for the first three or four years of our lives we all 
 tell the truth. But I mean you to like me, Leo, all the same.' 
 
 ' I hate 'oo,' said Leo, frankly — he always expressed himself 
 in strong Saxon English — ' but 'oo love my mamma.' 
 
 This, in a shrill childish treble, was awkward for the rest of 
 the party. Mrs. Fairfax Torrington gave an arch glance at Mr. 
 Fitz Jesse. Dopsy reddened, and exploded in a little spluttering 
 laugh behind her napkin. Christabel looked divinely uncon- 
 scious, smiling down at her boy, whose chair had been placed at 
 the corner of the table close to his mother. 
 
 4 St is a poet's privilege to worship the beautiful, Leo,' said 
 the Baron, with a self-satisfied smirk. ' The old troubadour's 
 right of allegiance to the loveliest — as old as chivalry.'' 
 
 'And as disreputable,' said Fitz Jesse. 'If I had been one 
 of the knights of old, and had found a troubadour sneaking 
 about my premises, that troubadour's head should have been 
 through his guitar before he knew where he was — or he should 
 have discovered that my idea of a common chord was a halter.
 
 ' Tims Tarns the Old Days to Derision.' 297 
 
 But in our present age of ultra-refinement the social troubadour 
 is a gentleman, and the worship of beauty one of the higher 
 forms of culture.' 
 
 The Baron looked at the journalist suspiciously. Bold as he 
 was of speech and bearing, he never ventured to cross swords 
 with Mr. FitzJesse. He was too much afraid of seeing an 
 article upon his Jersey antecedents or his married life in leaded 
 type in the Sling. 
 
 Happily Mr. Tregonell was not at luncheon upon this par- 
 ticular occasion. He had gone out shooting with Jack Vandeleur 
 and little Monty. It was supposed to be a great year for wood- 
 cock, and the Squire and his friends had been after the birds in 
 every direction, except St. Neetan's Kieve. He had refused to go 
 there, although it was a tradition that the place was a favourite 
 resort of the birds. 
 
 ' Why don't you shoot, Mrs. Tregonell ? ' asked Mrs. Tor- 
 rington ; 'it is just the one thing that makes life worth living in 
 a country like this, where there is no great scope for hunting.' 
 
 ' I should like roaming about the hills, but I could never 
 bring myself to hit a bird,' answered Christabel. 'I am too 
 fond of the feathered race. I don't know why or what it is, but 
 there is something in a bird which appeals intensely to one's 
 pity. I have been more sorry than I can say for a dying 
 sparrow ; and I can never teach myself to remember that birds 
 are such wretchedly cruel and unprincipled creatures in their 
 dealings with one another that they really deserve very little 
 compassion from man.' 
 
 ' Except that man has the responsibility of knowing better, 
 said Mr, FitzJesse. ' That infernal cruelty of the animal crea- 
 tion is one of the problems that must perplex the gentle optimist 
 who sums up his religion in a phrase of Pope's, and avows that 
 whatever is, is right. Who, looking at the meek meditative 
 countenance of a Jersey cow, those large stag-like eyes — Juno'a 
 eyes — would believe that Mrs. Cow is capable of trampling a 
 sick sister to death — nay, would look upon the op^i-wiion as a 
 matter of course — a thing to be done for the good of society.' 
 
 ' Is there not a little moral trampling done by stag-eyed 
 creatures of a higher grade,' asked Mrs. Torringtou. ' Let a 
 woman once fall down in the mud, and there are plenty of her 
 own sex ready to grind her into the mire. Cows have a coarser, 
 more practical way of treating their fallen sisters, but the prin- 
 ciple is the same, don't you know.' 
 
 'I have always found man the more malignant animal,' said 
 FitzJesse. ' At her worst a woman generally has a motive for 
 the evil she does — some wrong to avenge — some petty slight to 
 retaliate. A man stabs for the mere pleasure of stabbing. 
 With him slander is one of the tine arts. Depend upon it your 
 Crabtree i .; a more malevolent creature than Mrs. Candour — and 
 the Candours wj aid not kill reputations if the Crabtrees did not
 
 298 Mount Royal. 
 
 admire ana applaud the slaughter. For my own pare I believe 
 that if there were no men in the world, women would be almost 
 kind to each other.' 
 
 The Baron did not enter into this discussion. He had no 
 taste for any subject out of his own line, which was art and 
 beauty. With character or morals he had nothing to do. He 
 did not even pretend to listen to the discourse of the others, but 
 amused himself with petting Leo, who sturdily repulsed his 
 endearments. When he spoke it was to reply to Christabel's last 
 remark. 
 
 ' If you are fonder of roaming on the hills than of shooting. 
 Mrs. Tregonell, why should we not organize a _ rambling party \ 
 It is not too late for a picnic. Let us hold ourselves ready for 
 the first bright day — perhaps, after this deluge, we shall have 
 fine weather to-morrow — and organize a pilgrimage to Tintagel, 
 with all the freedom of pedestrians, who can choose their own 
 company, and are not obliged to sit opposite the person they 
 least care about in the imprisonment of a barouche or a wagonette. 
 Walking picnics are the only picnics worth having. You are a 
 good walker, I know, Mrs. Tregonell ; and you, Mrs. Torrington, 
 you can walk, I have no doubt.' 
 
 The widow smiled and nodded. ' Oh, yes I am good for 
 half-a-dozen miles, or so,' she said, wondering whether she 
 possessed a pair of boots in which she could walk, most of her 
 boots being made rather with a view to exhibition on a fender- 
 stool or on the step of a carriage than to locomotion. ' But I 
 think as I am not quite so young as I was twenty years ago, I 
 had better follow you in the pony-carriage.' 
 
 ' Pony-carriage, me no pony-carriages,' exclaimed de Cazalet. 
 ' Ours is to be a walking picnic and nothing else. If you like to 
 meet us as we come home you can do so — but none but pedes- 
 trians shall drink our champagne or eat our salad — that salad 
 which I shall have the honour to make for you with my own 
 hands. Mrs. Tregonell.' 
 
 Jessie Bridgeman looked at Christabel to see if any painful 
 memory — any thought of that other picnic at Tintagel when 
 Angus Hamleigh was still a stranger, and the world seemed made 
 for gladness and laughter, would disturb her smiling serenity. 
 But there was no trace of mournful recollection in that bright 
 beaming face which was turned in all graciousness towards 
 the Baron, who sat caressing Leo's curls, while the boy wriggled 
 his plump shoiuders half out of his black velvet frock in palpable 
 disgust at the caress. 
 
 ' Oh ! it will be too lovely — too utterly ouftish,' exclaimed 
 Dopsy, who had lately acquired this last flower of speech — a 
 word which might be made to mean almost anything, from the 
 motive power which impels a billiard cue to the money that pays 
 the player's losses at pcol — a word which is % substantive 02 
 adjective according to the sDeaker's pleasure
 
 4 Thou shouldst come like a Fury.' 299 
 
 'I suppose we shall be allowed to join you,' said Mopsy, ' we 
 are splendid walkers.' 
 
 'Of course — entry open to all weights and ages, with Mrs. 
 Tregoneil's permission.' 
 
 * Let it be your picnic, Baron, since it is your idea,' said 
 Christabel ; ' my housekeeper shall take your orders about the 
 luncheon, and we will all consider ourselves your guests.' 
 
 ' I shall expire if 1 am left out in the cold,' said Mis. 
 Torrington. * You really must allow age the privilege of a pony- 
 carriage. That delightful cob of Mrs. Tregoneil's understands 
 me perfectly.' 
 
 ' Well, on second thoughts, you shall have the carriage,' said 
 de Cazalet, graciously. ' The provisions can't walk. It shall be 
 your privilege to bring them. We will have no servants. M r. 
 Faddie, Mr. FitzJesse, and I will do all the fetching and carry- 
 ing, cork-drawing, and salad-making.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 'THOU SHOULDST COME LIKE xV fury crowned WITH SNAKES.'' 
 
 When the shooting party came home to afternoon tea, Dopsy 
 and Mopsy were both full of the picnic. The sun was sinking 
 in lurid splendour ; there was every chance of a fine day to- 
 morrow. De Cazalet had interviewed the housekeeper, and 
 ordered luncheon. Mopsy went about among the men like a 
 recruiting sergeant, telling them of the picnic, and begging them 
 to join in that festivity. 
 
 ' It will be wretched for Dopsy and I ' — her grammar was 
 weak, and she had a fixed idea that ' I' was a genteeler pronoun 
 than ' me,' — ' if you don't all come,' she said to Colonel Blathwayt. 
 ' Of course the Baron will devote himself exclusively to Mrs. 
 Tregonell. FitzJesse will go in the pony trap with Mrs. 
 Torrington, and they'll have vivisected everybody they know 
 before they get there. And I can't get on a little bit with Mr. 
 Faddie, though he is awfully nice. I feel that if I were to let 
 him talk to me an hour at a stretch I should be obliged to go 
 and join some Protestant sisterhood and wear thick boots and 
 too fearful bonnets for the rest of my days.' 
 
 ' And what would society do without Mopsy Vandeleur 1 ' 
 asked the Colonel, smiling at her. ' I should enjoy a ramble 
 with you above all things, but a picnic is such a confoundedly 
 infantine business. I always feel a hundred years old when I 
 attempt to be gay and frisky before dusk — feel as if I had been 
 dead and come back to life again, as 3ome of the savage 1 ribea 
 believe. However, if it will really please you, I'll give up the 
 birds to-morrow, and join your sports.' 
 
 ' How sweet of you,' exclaimed Mopsy, with a thrilling look 
 from under her painted lashes. ' The whole thing would be 
 ghastly without you.' 
 
 r
 
 SUO Mount Boyau. 
 
 'What's the rtw?' asked Leonard, turning his head upon 
 the cushion of the easy chair in which he lolled at full length, 
 to look up at the speakers as they stood a little way behind him. 
 
 The master of Mount Eoyal was sitting by one fireplace, 
 with a table and tea-tray all to himself ; while Mrs. Tregonell 
 and her circle were grouped about the hearth at the opposite end 
 of the hall. Jack Vandeleur and little Monty stood in front of 
 the fire near their host, faithful adherents to the friend who fed 
 them ; but all the rest of the party clustered round Christabel. 
 
 Mopsy told Mr. Tregonell all about the intended picnic. 
 
 ■ It is to be the Baron's affair,' she said, gaily. ' He organized 
 it, and he is to play the host. There are to be no carriages — 
 except the pony-trap for Mrs. Torrington, who pinches her feet 
 and her waist to a degree that makes locomotion impossible. 
 We are all to walk except her. And I believe we are to have tea at 
 the farm by St. Piran's well — a simple farmhouse tea in some dear 
 old whitewashed room with a huge fireplace, hams and onions 
 and things hanging from the rafters. Isn't it a lovely idea 1 ' 
 
 ' Very,' grumbled Leonard ; ' but I should say you could 
 have your tea a great deal more comfortable here without being 
 under an obligation to the farm people.' 
 
 ' Oh, but we have our tea here every afternoon,' said Mopsy. 
 ' Think of the novelty of the thing.' 
 
 ■ No doubt. And this picnic is the Baron's idea ! ' 
 
 • His and Mrs. Tregonell's, they planned it all between them. 
 And they are going to get up private theatricals for your birth- 
 day.' 
 
 ■ How kind,' growled Leonard, scowling at his teacup. 
 
 ' Isn't it sweet of them 1 They are going to play " Delicate 
 Ground." He is to be Citizen Sangfroid and she Pauline — the 
 husband and wife who quarrel and pretend to separate and are 
 desperately fond of each other all the time, don't you know 1 It's 
 a powder piece.' 
 
 'A what?' 
 
 ' A play in which the people wear powdered wigs and patches, 
 and all that kind of thing. How dense you are.' 
 
 ' I was born so, I believe. And in this powder piece Mrs. 
 Tregonell and Baron de Cazalet are to be husband and wife, and 
 quarrel and make friends again — eh ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. The reconciliation is awfully fetching. But you are 
 not jealous, are you ?' 
 
 ' Jealous ? Not the least bit.' 
 
 ' That's so nice of you ; and you will come to our picnic to- 
 morrow 1 ' 
 
 1 1 think not.' 
 
 ' Why not 1 ' 
 
 ' Because the woodcock season is a short one, and I want to 
 make the best use of my time.' 
 
 • What a barbarian, to prefer any sport to our society , : ex*
 
 ' Thoit sfwuldst come like a Fury. 301 
 
 claimed Mopsy, coquettishly. 'For my part I Late (he very 
 name of woodcock.' 
 
 ' Why ?' asked Leonard, looking at her keenly, with his dark, 
 bright eyes ; eyes which had that hard, glassy brightness that 
 Has always a cruel look. 
 
 ' Because it reminds me of that dreadful day last year when 
 poor Mr. Hamleigh was killed. If he had not gone out wood- 
 cock shooting he would not have been killed.' 
 
 ' No ; a man's death generally hinges upon something, 
 answered Leonard, with a chilling sneer; 'no effect without a 
 cause. But I don't think you need waste your lamentations 
 upon Mr. Hamleigh ; he did not treat your sister particularly 
 well.' 
 
 Mopsy sighed, and was thoughtful for a moment or two. 
 Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montague had strolled off to change 
 their clothes. The master of the house and Miss Vandeleur 
 were alone at their end of the old hall. Ripples of silvery 
 laughter, and the souud of mirthful voices came from the group 
 about the other fireplace, where the blaze of piled-up logs went 
 roaring up the wide windy chimney, making the most magical 
 changeful light in which beauty or its opposite can be seen. 
 
 'Xo, he hardly acted fairly to poor Dopsy : he led her on, 
 don't you know, and we both thought he meant to propose. It 
 would have been such a splendid match for her — and I could 
 have stayed with them sometimes.' 
 
 ' Of course you could. Sometimes in your case would have 
 meant all the year round.' 
 
 ' And he was so fascinating, so handsome, ill as he looked, 
 poor darling,' sighed Mopsy. ' 1 know Dop hadn't one mercenary 
 feeling about him. It was a genuine case of spoons — she would 
 have died for him.' 
 
 'If he had wished it ; but men have not yet gone in for 
 collecting corpses,' sneered Leonard. ' However poor the speci- 
 men of your sex may be, they prefer the living subject — even 
 the surgeons are all coming round to that.' 
 
 ' Don't be nasty,' protested Mopsy. ' I only meant to say 
 that Dopsy really adored Angus Hamleigh for his own sake. I 
 know how kindly you felt upon the subject — and that you 
 wanted it to be a match.' 
 
 'Yes, I did my best,' answered Leonard. 'I brought him 
 nere, and gave you both your chance.' 
 
 ' And Jack said that you spoke very sharply to Mr. Hamleigh 
 that last night.' 
 
 ' Yes, I gave him a piece of my mind. I toll him that ho 
 had no right to come into my house and play fast and loose with 
 my friend s siati 
 
 'How did he take it?' 
 
 'Pretty quietly.' 
 
 ' You did not Quarrel with him J '
 
 302 Mount Royal. 
 
 'No, it could hardly be called a quarrel. We were both too 
 reasonable — understood each other too thoroughly,' answered 
 Leonard, as he got up and we-nt off to his dressing-room, leaving 
 Mopsy sorely perplexed bj an indescribable something in hi° 
 tone and manner. Surely there must be some fatal meaning in 
 that dark evil smile, which changed to so black a frown, and that 
 deep sigh which seemed wrung from the very heart of the man : 
 a man whom Mopsy had hitherto believed to be somewhat poorly 
 furnished with that organ, taken in its poetical significance as a 
 thing that throbs with love and pity. 
 
 Alone in his dressing-room the lord of the Manor sat down 
 in front of the fire with his boots on the hob, to muse upon the 
 incongruity of his present position in his own house. A year 
 ago he had ruled supreme, sovereign master of the domestic 
 circle, obeyed and ministered to in all humility by a lovely and 
 pure-minded wife. Now he was a cipher in his own house, the 
 husband of a woman who was almost as strange to him as if he 
 had seen her face for the first time on his return from South 
 America. This beautiful brilliant creature, who held him at 
 arm's length, defied him openly with looks and tones in which 
 his guilty soul recognized a terrible meaning — looks and tones 
 which he dare not challenge — this woman who lived only for 
 pleasure, fine dress, frivolity, who had given his house the free- 
 and-easv air of a mess-room, or a club — could this be indeed the 
 woman he had loved in her girlhood, the fair and simple-minded 
 wife whom his mother had trained for him, teaching her all good 
 things, withholding all knowledge of evil. 
 
 ' I'm not going to stand it much longer,' he said to himself, 
 with an oath, as he kicked the logs about upon his fire, and then 
 got up to dross for the feast at which he always felt himself just 
 the one guest who was not wanted. 
 
 He had been at home three weeks — it seemed an age — an age 
 of disillusion and discontent — and he had not yet sought any 
 explanation with ChristabeL Nor yet had he dared to claim hi? 
 right to be obeyed as a husband, to be treated as a friend 
 and adviser. "With a strange reluctance he pat off the explana- 
 tion from day to day, and in the meanwhile the aspect of life at 
 Mount Eoyal was growing daily less agreeable to him. Could 
 it be that this wife of his, whose purity and faith he had tried by 
 the hardest test — the test of daily companionship with her first 
 and only lover — was inclined to waver now — to play him false 
 for so shallow a coxcomb, so tawdry a fine gentleman as Oliver 
 de Cazalet. Not once, but many times within the past week lie 
 had asked himself that question. Could it be 1 lie had heard 
 strange stories — had known of queer cases of the falling away of 
 good women from the path of virtue. He had heard of sober 
 matrons — mothers of fair children, wivea of many years — the 
 Cornelias of their circle, staking home, husband, children, 
 honour, good iwme ; and troops of friends against the wild
 
 ' Thai shouldst come like a Fury.' 803 
 
 delirium of some new-born fancy, sudden, demoniac a3 the dance 
 of death. The women who go wrong are not always the most 
 likely women. It is not the trampled slave, the neglected and 
 forlorn wife of a bad husband — but the pearl and treasure of a 
 happy circle who takes the fatal plunge into the mire. The 
 forlorn slave-wife stays in the dreary home and nurses her 
 children, battles with her husband's creditors, consoles herself 
 with church going and many praj'ers, fondly hoping for a future 
 day in which Tom will find out that she is fairer and clearer than 
 any of his false godesses, and come home repentant to the 
 domestic hearth : while the good husband's idol, sated with 
 legitimate worship, gives herself up all at once to the intoxication 
 of unholy incense, and topples off her shrine. Leonard Tregonell 
 knew that the world was full of such psychological mysteries ; 
 and vet he could hardly bring himself to believe that Ciiristabel 
 was one of the stuff that makes false wives, or that she could be 
 won by such a third-rate Don Juan as the Baron de Cazalet. 
 
 The dinner was a little noisier and gayer than usual to-night. 
 Everyone talked, laughed, told anecdotes, let off puns, more or 
 ] - atrocious — except the host, who sat in his place an image of 
 gloom. Happily Mrs. St. Aubyn was one of those stout, healthy, 
 contented people who enjoy their dinner, and only talk about as 
 much as is required for the assistance of digestion. She told 
 prosy stories about her pigs and poultry — which were altogether 
 superior, intellectually and physically, to other people's pigs and 
 poultry — and only paused once or twice to exclaim, ' You are 
 looking awfully tired, Mr. Tregonell. You must have overdone 
 it to-day. Don't you take curacoa? I always do after ice 
 pudding. It's so comforting. Do you know at the last dinner 
 I was at before I came here the curagoa was ginger-brandy. 
 Wasn't that horrid I People ought not to do such things.' 
 
 Leonard suggested in a bored voice that this might have 
 been the butler's' mistake. 
 
 ' I don't think so. I believe it was actual meanness — but I 
 shall never take liqueur at that house again,' said Mrs. St. Aubyn, 
 in an injured tone. 
 
 1 Are you going to this picnic to-morrow 1 ' 
 
 ' I think not. I'm afraid the walk would be too much for me — 
 
 and I am not fond enough of Mrs. Torrington to enjoy two hours' 
 
 i-tete in a pony-carriage. My girls will go, of course. And I 
 
 suppose you will be there,' added Mrs. St. Aubyn, with intention. 
 
 ' Xo, Vandeleur, Monty and I are going shooting.' 
 
 'Well, if I were in your shoes and had such a pretty wife, I 
 should not leave iier to go picnicing about the world with such 
 an attractive, man as the Baron.' 
 
 Leonard gave an uneasy little laugh, meant to convey the 
 idea of supreme security. 
 
 'I'm not je of de Cazalet,' he said. ' Surely you don't 
 
 call him an attractive man.'
 
 ,",04 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' Dangerously attractive,' replied Mrs. St. Aubyn, gazing at 
 the distant Baron, whose florid good looks were asserting them- 
 selves at the further end of the table, on Christabel's left hand 
 — she had Mr. St. Aubyn's grey, contented face, glistening with 
 dinner, on her right. ' He is just the kind of man I should 
 have fallen in love with when I was your wife's age.' 
 
 ' Really,' exclaimed Leonard, incredulously. ' But I suppose 
 after you married St. Aubyn, you left off falling in love.' 
 
 ' Of course. I did not put myself in the way of temptation. 
 I should never have encouraged such a man — handsome, 
 accomplished, unscrupulous — as Baron de Cazalet.' 
 
 ' I don't think his good looks or his unscrupulousness will 
 make any difference to my wife,' said Leonard. ' She knows 
 how to take care of herself.' 
 
 ' No doubt. But that does not release you from the duty 
 of taking care. You had better go to the picnic' 
 
 ' My dear Mrs. St. Aubyn, if I were to go now, after what 
 you have just said to me, you might suppose I was jealous of de 
 Cazalet ; and that is just the one supposition I could not stand,' 
 answered Leonard. ' It would take a dozen such fascinating 
 men to shake my confidence in my wife : she is not an acquaint- 
 ance of yesterday, remember : I have known her all my life.' 
 
 ' Mrs. St. Aubyn sighed and shook her head. She was one 
 of those stupid well-meaning women whose mission in life is to 
 make other people uncomfortable — with the best intentions. 
 She kept a steady look-out for the approaching misfortunes of 
 her friends. She was the first to tell an anxious mother that her 
 youngest boy was sickening for scarlet fever, or that her eldest 
 girl looked consumptive. She prophesied rheumatics and 
 bronchitis to incautious people who went out in wet weather — 
 she held it as a fixed belief that all her friends' houses were 
 damp. It was in vain that vexed householders protested against 
 such a suspicion, and held forth upon the superiority of their 
 drainage, the felt under their tiles, their air bricks, and ven- 
 tilators. 'My dear, your house is damp,' she would reply 
 conclusively. ' What it would be if you had not taken those 
 precautions I shudder to imagine— but I only know that I get 
 the shivers every time I sit in your drawing-room, 
 
 To-night she was somewhat offended with Mr. Tregonell that 
 he refused to take alarm at her friendly warning, She had 
 made up her mind that it was her duty to speak. She had told 
 the girls so in the course of their afternoon constitutional, a 
 private family walk. 
 
 ' If things get any worse I shall take you away,' she said, as 
 they trudged along the lane in their waterproofs, caring very 
 little for a soft drizzling rain, which was supposed to be good 
 for their complexions. 
 
 ' Don't, mother,' said Emily. ' Clara and I are br.ving such & 
 jolly time. Mrs. Tregonell is straight enough, I'm sure. She
 
 ' His Lady Smiles : Delight is in her Face.' 305 
 
 does flirt outrageously with the Baron, I admit ; but au open 
 flirtation of that kind seldom means mischief ; and Mr. Tre- 
 gonell is such a heavy clod-hopping fellow: his wife maybe forgiven 
 for flirting a little.' 
 
 1 Mrs. .Tregonell flirts more than a little,' replied Mrs. St. 
 Aubyn. All I can say is, I don't like it, and I don' think it's a 
 proper spectacle for girls.' 
 
 ' Then you'd better send us back to the nursery, mother, or 
 shut us up in a convent,' retorted the younger of the damsels. 
 ' If you don't want us to see young married women flirt, you 
 must keep us very close indeed.' 
 
 'If you feel uneasy about your Cochin Chinas, mother, you 
 can go home, and lea™* us to follow with the pater,' said Emily. 
 ' I've set my heart &j*m stopping till after Mr. Tregonell's birth- 
 day, the 14th of November, for the theatricals will be fine fun, 
 They talk of " High Life Below Stairs " for us girls, aftel 
 "Delicate Ground ;" and I think we shall be able to persuade 
 Mrs. Tregonell to wind up with a dance. What is the use of 
 people having fine rooms if they don't know how to use them 1 ' 
 
 ' Mrs. Tregonell seems ready for anything,' sighed the matron, 
 1 1 never saw such a change in any one. Do j'ou remember how 
 quiet she was the summer before last, when we were here for a 
 
 few days 1 ' 
 
 CHAPTEB XXXI. 
 
 ' HIS LADY SMILES ; DELIGHT IS IN HER FACE.' 
 
 That benevolent advice of Mrs. St. Aubyn's was not without its 
 influence upon Leonard, lightly as he seemed to put aside the 
 insinuation of evil. The matron's speech helped to strengthen 
 his own doubts and fears. Other eyes than his had noted Chris- 
 label's manner of receiving the Baron's attentions — other people 
 had been impressed by the change in her. The thing was not 
 an evil of his own imagining. She was making herself the 
 talk of his friends and acquaintance. There was scandal — foul 
 suspicion in the very atmosphere she breathed. That mutual 
 understanding, that face to face arraignment, which he felt must 
 come sooner or later, could not be staved oft* much longer. The 
 wife who defied him thus openly, making light of him under his 
 own roof, must be brought to book. 
 
 ' To-morrow she and I must come to terms,' Leonard said to 
 himself. 
 
 No one had much leisure for thought that evening. The 
 drawing-room was a scene of babble and laughter, music, flirta- 
 tion, frivolity, everybody seeming to be blest with that happy- 
 go-lucky temperament which can extract mirth from the merest 
 trifles. Jessie Bridgeman and Mr. Tregonell were the only 
 lookers-on — the only two people who in Jack Vandeleur's 
 favourite] phrase were not ' in it.' Every one else was full of 
 the private theatricals. The idea had only been mooted aftei 
 luncheon, and now it seemed as if life could hardly have been 
 
 x
 
 306 Mount Boyaz. 
 
 bearable yesterday without this thrilling prospect. Colonel 
 Blathwayt, who had been out shooting all the afternoon, entered 
 vigorously into the discussion. He was an experienced amateur 
 actor, had helped to swell the funds of half the charitable insti- 
 tutions of London and the provinces ; so he at once assumed the 
 function of stage manager. 
 
 ' De Cazalet can act,' he said. ' I have seen him at South 
 Kensington ; but I don't think he knows the ropes as well as I 
 do. You must let me manage the whole business for you ; write 
 to the London people for stage and scenery, lamps, costumes, 
 wigs. And of course you will want me for Alphonse.' 
 
 Little Monty had been suggested for Alphonse. He was fair- 
 haired and effeminate, and had just that small namby-pamby air 
 which would suit Pauline's faint-hearted lover ; but nobody dared 
 to say anything about him when Colonel Blathwayt made this 
 generous offer, 
 
 ' Will you really play Alphonse !' exclaimed Christabel, look- 
 ing up from a volume of engravings, illustrating the costumes of 
 the Directory and Empire, over which the young ladies of the 
 party, notably Dopsy and Mopsy, had been giggling and ejacu- 
 lating. ' We should not have ventured tooffer you a secondary part.' 
 
 ' You'll find it won't be a secondary character as I shall play 
 it,' answered the Colonel, calmly. ' Alphonse will go better than 
 any part in the piece. And now as to the costumes. Do you 
 want to be picturesque, or do you want to be correct 1 ' 
 
 1 Picturesque by ail means,' cried Mopsy. ' Dear Mrs. Tre- 
 gonell would look too lovely in powder and patches.' 
 
 ' Like Boucher's Pompadour,' said the Colonel ' Do you 
 know I think, now fancy balls are the rage, the Louis Quinze 
 costume is rather played out. Every ponderous matron fancies 
 herself in powder and brocade. The powder is hired for the 
 evening, and the brocade is easily convertible into a dinner 
 gown,' added the Colonel, who spent the greater part of his life 
 among women, and prided himself upon knowing their ways. 
 ' For my part, I should like to see Mrs. Tregonell dressed like 
 Madame Tallien.' 
 
 ' Undressed like Madame Tallien, you mean,' said Captain 
 Vandelaur ; and thereupon followed a hvely discussion as to the 
 costume of the close of the last century as compared with the 
 costume of to-day, which ended in somebody's assertion that the 
 last years of a century are apt to expire in social and political 
 convulsions, and that there was every promise of revolution as a 
 wmd-up for the present age. 
 
 ' My idea of the close of the nineteenth century is that it will 
 be a period of dire poverty,' said the proprietor of the Sling ; ' an 
 age of pauperism already heralded bythe sale of noble old mansions, 
 the breaking-up of great estates, the destruction cf famous col- 
 lections, galleries, libraries, the pious hoards of generations of 
 connoisseurs and book-worms, scattered to the four winds by a
 
 'Sis Lady Smiles ; Delight is in her Face.' 307 
 
 rtroke of the auctioneer's hammer. The landed interest and the 
 commercial classes are going down the hill together. Suez has 
 ruined our shipping interests ; an unreciprocated free trade is 
 uuining our commerce. Coffee, tea, cotton — our markets are 
 narrowing for alL After a period of lavish expenditure, reckless 
 extravagance, or at any rate the affectation of reckless extrava- 
 gance, there will come an era of dearth. Those are wisest who 
 will foresee and anticipate the change, simplify their habits, 
 reduce their luxuries, put on a Quakerish sobriety in dress and 
 entertainments, which, if carried out nicely, may pass for high 
 art — train themselves to a kind of holy poverty outside the 
 cloister — and thus break their fall. Depend upon it, there will 
 be a fall, for every one of those men and women who at this 
 present day are living up to their incomes.' 
 
 ' The voice is the voice of FitzJesse, but the words are the 
 words of Cassandra/ said Colonel Blathwayt. ' For my part, I 
 am like the Greeks, and never listen to such gloomy vaticina- 
 tions. I dare say the deluge will come — a deluge now and again 
 is inevitable ; but I think the dry land will last our time. And 
 in the meanwhile was there ever a pleasanter world than that 
 we live in — an entirely rebuilt and revivified London — clubs, 
 theatres, restaurants, without number — gaiety and brightness 
 everywhere ? If our amusements are frivolous, at least they are 
 hearty. If our friendships are transient, they are very pleasant 
 while they last. "We know people to-day and cut them to- 
 morrow ; that is one of the first conditions of good society. The 
 people who are cut understand the force of circumstances, and 
 are just as ready to take up the running a year or two hence, 
 when we can afford to know them.' 
 
 ' Blessed are the poor in spirit,' quoted little Monty, in a 
 meek voice. 
 
 ' Our women are getting every day more like the women of 
 the Directory ami the Consulate,' continued the Colonel. ' Wo 
 have come to short petticoats and gold anklets. All in good time 
 we shall cometo bare feet. We have abolished sleeves, and we have 
 brought bodices to a reductio ad absurdum ; but, although prudes 
 and puritans may disapprove our present form, I must say that 
 women were never so intelligent or so delightful. We have 
 c >me back to the days of the salon and the petit souper. Our 
 daughters are sirens and our wives are wits.' 
 
 ' Charming for Colonel Blathwayt, whose only experience is of 
 other people's wives and daughters,' said little Monty. ' But 1 
 don't feel sure that the owners are quite so happy.' 
 
 ' When a man marries a pretty woman, he puts himself be- 
 yond the pale,' said Mr. FitzJesse; 'nobody sympathizes with 
 him. I daresay there was not a member of the Grecian League 
 who did not long to kick Menelaus.' 
 
 'There should be stringent laws for die repression of nice 
 girls' fathers,' said little Monty. ' Co aid there not bo some kin J
 
 80S Mount Royal. 
 
 of institution like the Irish Land Court, to force parents to cash 
 up, and hand over daughter and dowry to any spirited young 
 man who made a bid? Here am I, a conspicuous martyr to 
 parental despotism. I might have married half a dozen heiresses, 
 but for the intervention of stony-hearted fathers. I have gons 
 for them at all ages, from pinafores to false fronts ; but I have 
 never been so lucky as to rise an orphan.' 
 
 ' Poor little Monty ! Bui what a happy escape for the lady.' 
 
 'Ah, I should have been vtry kind to her, even if her youth 
 and beauty dated before the Reform Bill,' said Mr. Montagu. 
 ' I should not have gone into society with her — one must draw 
 the line somewhere. But I should have been forbearing.' 
 
 ' Dear Mrs. Tregonell,' said Mopsy, gushingly, ' have you 
 made up your mind what to wear? ' 
 
 Christabel had been turning the leaves of a folio abstractedly 
 for the last ten minutes. 
 
 1 To wear ? Oh, for the play ! Well, I suppose I must be as 
 true to the period as I can, without imitating Madame Tallien. 
 Baron, you draw beautifully. Will you make a sketch for my 
 costume ? I know a little woman in George Street, Hanover 
 Square, who will carry out your idea charmingly.' 
 
 ' I should have thought that you could have imagined a short- 
 waisted gown and a pair of long mittens without the help of an 
 artist,' said Jessie, with some acidity. She had been sitting close 
 to the lamp, poring over a piece of point-lace work, a quiet and 
 observant listener. It was a fixed idea among the servants at 
 Mount Royal that Miss Bridgeman's eyes were constructed on 
 the same principle as those of a horse, and that she could see 
 behind her. ' There is nothing so very elaborate in the dress of 
 that period, is there 1 ' 
 
 ' I will try to realize the poetry of the costume.' 
 
 ' Oh, but the poetry means the bare feet and ankles, doesn't 
 it ! ' asked Miss Bridgeman. ' When you talk about poetry in 
 costume, you generally mean something that sets a whole roomful 
 of people staring and tittering.' 
 
 ' My Pauline will look a sylph ! ' said the Baron, with a 
 languishing glance at his hostess. 
 
 And thus, in the pursuit of the infinitely little, the evening 
 wore away. Songs and laughter, music of the lightest and most 
 evanescent character, games which touched the confines of idiocy, 
 and set Leonard wondering whether the evening amusements of 
 Colney Hatch and Hanwell could possibly savour of wilder 
 lunacy than these sports which his wife and her circle cultivated 
 in the grave old reception-room, where a council of Cavaliers, 
 with George Trevelyan of Nettlecombe, Royalist Colonel, at their 
 head, had met and sworn fealty to Charles Stuart's cause, at 
 hazard of fortune and life. 
 
 Leonard stood with his back to the wide old fire-place, 
 watching these revellers, and speculating, in a troubled spirit,
 
 *Bis Lady Smiles ; Delight is in her Face.' 309 
 
 as to how much of this juvenile friskiness was real ; contem- 
 plating, with a cynical spirit, that nice sense of class distinction 
 which enabled the two St. Aubyn girls to keep Mopsy and Dopsy 
 at an impassable distance, even while engaged with them in these 
 familiar sports. Vain that in the Post Office game, Dopsy as 
 Montreal exchanged places with Emily St. Aubyn as New- 
 market. Montreal and Newmarket themselves are not farther 
 apart geographically than the two damsels were morally as they 
 skipped into each other's chairs. Vain that in the Spelling game, 
 the South Belgravians caught up the landowner's daughters with 
 a surpassing sharpness, and sometimes turned the laugh against 
 those tender scions of the landed aristocracy. The very attitude 
 of Clara St. Aubyn's chin — the way she talked apart with Mrs. 
 Tregonell, seemingly unconscious of the Vandeleur presence, 
 marked her inward sense of the gulf between them. 
 
 It was midnight before any one thought of going to bed, yet 
 there was unwonted animation at nine o'clock next morning 
 in the dining-room, where every one was talking of the day's 
 expedition : always excepting the master of the house, wdio sat 
 at one end of the table, with Termagant, his favourite Irish 
 setter, crouched at his feet, and his game-bag lying on a chair 
 uear at hand. 
 
 ' Are you really going to desert us ] ' asked Mopsy, with her 
 sweetest smile. 
 
 ' I am not going to desert you, for I never had the faintest 
 intention of joining you,' answered Leonard bluntly ; ' whether 
 my wife and her friends made idiots of themselves by playing 
 nursery games in her drawing-room, or by skipping about a 
 windy height on the edge of the sea, is their own affair. I can 
 take my pleasure elsewhere.' 
 
 'Yes; but you take your pleasure very sadly, as somebody 
 said of English people generally,' urged Mopsy, whose only 
 knowledge of polite literature was derived from the classical 
 quotations and allusions in the Daily Telegraph ; ' you will be all 
 alone, for Jack and little Monty have promised to come with us.' 
 
 ' I gave them pei-fcct freedom of choice. They may like that 
 kind of thing. I don't.' 
 
 Against so firm a resolve argument would have been vain. 
 Mopsy gave a little sigh, and went on with her breakfast. She 
 was really sorry /or Leonard, who had been a kind and useful 
 friend to Jack for the last six years — who had been indeed the 
 backbone of Jack's resources, without which that gentleman's 
 pecuniary position would have collapsed into hopeless limpness, 
 She was <|uite sharp-sighted enough to see that the present 
 of affairs was obnoxious to Mr. Tregonell — that he wa4 
 savagely jealous, yet dared not remonstrate with his wife. 
 
 ' I should have thought he was just the last man to poV up 
 with anything of that kind,' she said to Dopsy, in then be 1- 
 chamber confidences ; ' I mean her carrying on with the Baron.'
 
 810 Movmt Royal. 
 
 1 You needn't explain yourself,' retorted Dopsy, it's visible to 
 the naked eye. If you or I were to carry on like that in another 
 woman's house we should get turned out ; but Mrs. Tregonell is 
 in her own house, and so long as her husband doesn't see fit 
 to complain ' 
 
 ' But when will he see fit ? He stands by and watches his 
 
 life's open flirtation with the Baron, and lets her go on from 
 
 bad to worse. He must see that her very nature is changed since 
 
 last year, and yet he makes no attempt to alter her conduct. He 
 
 is an absolute worm.' 
 
 ' Even the worm will turn at last. You may depend he will,' 
 said Dopsy sententiously. 
 
 This was last night's conversation, and now in the bright 
 fresh October morning, with a delicious coolness in the clear air, 
 a balmy warmth in the sunshine, Dopsy and Mopsy were 
 smiling at their hostess, for whose kindness they could not help 
 feeling deeply grateful, whatever they might think of her con- 
 duct. They recognized a divided duty — loyalty to Leonard, as 
 their brother's patron, and the friend who had first introduced 
 them to this land of Beulah — gratitude to Mrs. Tregonell, without 
 whose good graces they could not long have made their abode here. 
 
 ' You are not going with us 1 ' asked Christabel, carelessly 
 scanning Leonard's shooting gear, as she rose from the table and 
 drew on her long moiisquetaire gloves. 
 
 ' No — I'm going to shoot.' 
 
 ' Shall you go to the Kieve ? That's a good place for wood- 
 cock, don't you know?' Jessie Bridgeman stared aghast at the 
 speaker. ' If you go that way in the afternoon you may fall in 
 with us : we are to drink tea at the farm.' 
 
 ' Perhaps I may go that way.' 
 
 ' And now, if every one is ready, we had better start,' said 
 Christabel, looking round at her party. 
 
 She wore a tight-fitting jacket, dark olive velvet, and a cloth 
 skirt, both heavily trimmed with sable, a beaver hat, with an 
 ostrich feather, which made a sweeping curve round the brim, 
 and caressed the coil of golden-brown hair at the back of the 
 small head. The costume, which was faintly suggestive of a 
 hunting party at Fontainebleau or St. Germains, became the tall, 
 finely-moulded figure to admiration. Nobody could doubt for 
 an instant that Mrs. Tregonell was dressed for effect, and was 
 determined to get full Vi.-ue out of her beauty. The neat 
 tailor gown and simple little cloth toque of the past, had given 
 way to a costly and elaborate costume, in which every detail 
 marked the careful study of the coquette who lives only to bfc 
 admired. Dopsy and Mopsy felt a natural pang of envy as thej 
 scrutinized the quality of the cloth and calculated the cost of the 
 fur ; but they consoled themselves with the conviction that there 
 was a bewitching Kate Greenaway quaintness in tlieir own 
 llimsy garments which made up for the poverty of the stuff, and
 
 ' His Lad-/ Smiles ; Delight is in her Face.' 311 
 
 the doubtful finish of home dressmaking. A bunch of crimson 
 poppies on Mopsy's shoulder, a cornflower in Dopsy's hat, made 
 vivid gleams of colour upon their brown merino frocks, while the 
 freshness of their saffron-tinted Toby frills was undeniable. 
 Sleeves shoit and tight, and ten-buttoned Swedish gloves, made 
 up a toilet whioh Dopsy and Mopsy had believed to be aestheti- 
 cally perfect, until they compared it with ChristabePs rich and 
 picturesqxte attire. The St. Aubyn girls were not less conscious 
 of the superiority of Mrs. Tregonell's appearance, but they were 
 resigned to the inevitable. How could a meagre quarterly 
 allowance, doled out by an unwilling father, stand against a 
 wife's unlimited power of running up bills. And here was a 
 woman who had a fortune of her own to squander as she pleased, 
 without anybody's leave or license. Secure in the severity of slate- 
 coloured serges made by a West-end tailor, with hats to match, and 
 the best boots and gloves that money could buy the St. Aubyn's 
 girls affected to despise Christabel's olive velvet and sable tails. 
 
 ' It's the worst possible form to dress like that for a country 
 ramble,' murmured Emily to Clara. 
 
 'Of course. But the country's about the only place where 
 she could venture to wear such clothes,' replied Clara : ' she'd be 
 laughed at in London.' 
 
 ' Well, I don't know : there were some rather loud get-ups in 
 the Park last season,' said Emily. ' It's really absurd the way 
 married women out-dress girls.' 
 
 Once clear of the avenue, Mrs.Tregonell and her guests arranged 
 themselves upon the Darwinian principle of natural selection. 
 
 That brilliant bird the Baron, whose velvet coat and knicker- 
 bockers were the astonishment of Boscastle, instinctively drew 
 near to Christabel, whose velvet and sable, plumed hat, and 
 point-lace necktie pointed her out as his proper mate — Little 
 Monty, Bohemian and dfcousu, attached himself as naturally to 
 one of the Vandeleur birds, shunning the iron-grey respectability 
 of the St. Aubyn breed. 
 
 Mrs. St. Aubyn, who had made up her mind at the last to 
 join the party, fastened herself upon St. Bernard Faddie, in the 
 fond hope that he would be able to talk of parish matters, and 
 advise her about her duties as Lady Bountiful ; while he, on his 
 part, only cared for rubric and ritual, and looked upon parish 
 visitation as an inferior branch of duty, to be performed by 
 newly-fledged curates. Mr. FitzJesse took up with Dopsy, who 
 amused him as a marked specimen of nineteenth-century girl- 
 hood — a rare and wonderful bird of its kind, like a heavily wattled 
 barb pigeon not beautiful, but infinitely curious. The two St. 
 Aubyn girls, in a paucity of the male sex, had to put up with 
 the escort of Captain Vandeleur, to whom they were extremely 
 civil, although they studiously ignored his sisters. And so, by 
 lane and field-path, by hill and vale, they went up to the broad, 
 open heights above the sea — a sea that was very fair to look
 
 812 Mount Royal. 
 
 upon on this sunshiny autumn day, luminous with those trans- 
 lucent hues of amethyst and emerald, sapphire and garnet 
 which make the ever changeful glory of that Cornish strand. 
 
 Miss Bridgeman walked half the way with the St. Aubyn 
 girls and Captain Vandeleur. The St. Aubyns had always been 
 civd to her, not without a certain tone of patronage which 
 would have wounded a more self-conscious person, but which 
 Jessie endured with perfect good temper. 
 
 ' What does it matter if they have the air of bending down 
 from a higher social level every time they talk to me,' she said ta 
 Major Bree, lightly, when he made some rude remark about these 
 young ladies. ' If it pleases them to fancy themselves on a 
 pinnacle, the fancy is a harmless one, and can't hurt me. I 
 shouldn't care to occupy that kind of imaginary height myself. 
 There must be a disagreeable sense of chilliness and remoteness ; 
 and then there is always the fear of a sudden drop ; like that 
 fall through infinite space which startles one sometimes on the 
 edge of sleep.' 
 
 Armed with that calm philosophy which takes all small 
 things lightly, Jessie was quite content that the Miss St. 
 Aubyns should converse with her as if she were a creature of an 
 inferior race — born with lesser hopes and narrower needs than 
 theirs, and with no rights worth mention. She was content 
 that they should be sometimes familiar and sometimes distant — 
 that they should talk to her freely when there was no one else 
 with whom they could talk — and that they should ignore her 
 presence when the room was full. 
 
 To-day, Emily St. Aubyn was complaisant even to friendli- 
 ness. Her sister had completely appropriated Captain Vandeleur, 
 so Emily gave herself up to feminine gossip. There were some 
 subjects which she really wanted to discuss with Miss Bridgeman, 
 and this seemed a golden opportunity. 
 
 ' Are we really going to have tea at the farmhouse near St 
 Nectan's Kieve ?' she asked. 
 
 ' Didn't you hear Mrs. Tregonell say so V inquired Jessie, dryly. 
 
 ' I did ; but I could not help wondering a little. Was it not 
 at the Kieve that poor Mr. Hamleigh was killed 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes.' 
 
 'Don't you think it just a little heartless of Mrs. Tregonell 
 to choose that spot for a pleasure party 1 ' 
 
 ' The farmhouse is not the Kieve: they are at least a mile apart. 1 
 
 ' That's a mere quibble, Miss Bridgeman : the association is 
 just the same, and she ought to feel it.' 
 
 'Mis. Tregonell is my very dear friend,' answered Jessie. 
 ' She and her aunt are the only friends T have made in this world. 
 You can't suppose that I shall find fault with her conduct 1 ' 
 
 ' No, I suppose not. You would stand by her through thick 
 and thin ? ' 
 
 ' Through thick and thin.'
 
 * His Lady Smiles ; Delight is in her Face.' 313 
 
 'Even at the sacrifice of principle?' 
 
 'I should consider gratitude and friendship the governing 
 principles of my life where she is concerned.' 
 
 ' If she were to go ever so wrong, you would stand by her 1 ' 
 
 * Stand by her, and cleave to her — walk by her side till death, 
 wherever the path might lead. I should not encourage her in 
 wrong-doing. I should lift up my voice when there was need : 
 but I should never forsake her.' 
 
 ' That is your idea of friendship V 
 
 ' Unquestionably. To my mind, friendship which implies 
 anything less than that is meaningless. However, there is no need 
 for heroics : Mrs. Tregonell is not going to put me to the test.' 
 
 ' I hope not She is very sweet. I should be deeply pained 
 if she were to go wrong. But do you know that my mother 
 does not at all like her manner with the Baron. My sister and 
 1 are much more liberal-minded, don't you know ; and we can 
 understand that all she says and does is mere frivolity — high 
 spirits which must find some outlet. Bat what surprises me 
 is that she should be so gay and light-hearted after the dreadful 
 events of her life. If such things had happened to me, I should 
 inevitably have gone over to Rome, and buried myself in the 
 severest conventual order that I could find.' 
 
 ' Yes, there have been sad events in hei life : but I think she 
 chose the wiser course in doing her duty by the aunt who 
 brought her up, than in self-immolation of that kind, answered 
 Jessie, with her thin lips drawn to the firmest line they were 
 capable of assuming. 
 
 ' But think what she must have suffered last year when that 
 poor man was killed. I remember meeting him at dinner when 
 they were first engaged. Such an interesting face — the counte- 
 nance of a poet. I could fancy Shelley or Keats exactly like him.' 
 
 ' We have their portraits,' said Jessie, intolerant of gush. 
 1 There is no scope for fancy.' 
 
 'But I think he really was a little like Keats — consumptive 
 looking, too, which carried out the idea. How utterly dreadful 
 it must have been for Mrs. Tregonell when he met his death, so 
 suddenly, so awfully, while he wa3 a guest under her roof. 
 How did she beai it ( ' 
 
 • Very quietly. She had borne the pain of breaking her engage- 
 ment for a principle, a mistaken one, as I think. His death 
 could hardly have given her worse pain.' 
 
 'But it was such an awful death.' 
 
 ' Awful in its suddenness, that is all — not more awful than 
 the death of any one of our English soldiers who fell in Zulu- 
 land the other day. After all, the mode and manner of death is 
 only a detail, and, so long as the physical pain is not severe, an 
 i detail. The one stupendous fact for the survivor 
 
 ins always the same. We had a friend and he is gone — for 
 ever, for all we know.'
 
 314 Mount Royal. 
 
 There wa- ♦*«> Faint sound of a sob in her voice as she finished 
 ipeaking. 
 
 ' Well all I can say is that if I were Mrs. Tregonell, I could 
 never have been happy again,' persisted Miss St. Aubyn. 
 
 They came to Trevena soon after this, and went down the 
 hill to the base of that lofty crag on which King Arthur's Castle 
 stood. They found Mrs. Fairfax and the pony-carriage in the 
 Valley. The provisions had all been carried up the ascent. 
 Everything was ready for luncheon. 
 
 A quarter of an hour later they were all seated on the long 
 grass and the crumbling stones, on which Christabel and her 
 lover had sat so often in that happy season of her life when love 
 was a new thought, and faith in the beloved one as boundless as 
 that far-reaching ocean, on which they gazed in dreamy content. 
 Now, instead of low talk about Arthur and Guinevere, Tristan 
 and Iseult, and all the legends of the dim poetic past, there 
 were loud voices and laughter, execrable puns, much conversa- 
 tion of the order generally known as chaff, a great deal of mild 
 personality of that kind which, in the age of Miss Burney and 
 Miss Austin was described as quizzing and roasting, and an all- 
 pervading flavour of lunacy. The Baron de Cazalet tried to 
 take advantage of the position, and to rise to poetry ; but he 
 was laughed down by the majority, especially by Mr. FitzJesse, 
 who hadn't a good word for Arthur and his Court. 
 
 ' Marc was a coward, and Tristan was a traitor and a knave,' 
 he said. ' While as for Iseult, the less said of her the better. 
 The legends of Arthur's birth are cleverly contrived to rehabili- 
 tate his mother's character, but the lady's reputation still is open 
 to doubt. Jack the Giant Killer and Tom Thumb are quite the 
 most respectable heroes connected with this western world. You 
 have no occasion to be proud of the associations of the soil, Mrs. 
 Tregonell.' 
 
 ' But I am proud of my country, and of its legends,' answered 
 
 ChristabeL 
 
 ' And you believe in Tristan and Iseult, and the constancy 
 which was personified by a bramble, as in the famous ballad of 
 Lord Level.' 
 
 ' The constancy which proved itself by marrying somebody 
 else, and remaining true to the old love all the same,' said Mrs. 
 Fairfax Torrington, in her society voice, trained to detonate 
 sharp sentences across the subdued buzz of a dinner-table. 
 
 ' Poor Tristan,' sighed Dopsy. 
 
 'Poor Iseult,' murmured Mopsy. 
 
 They had never heard of either personage until this morning. 
 
 1 Nothing in the life of either became them so well as the 
 leaving it,' said Mr. FitzJesse. ' The crowning touch of poetry 
 in Iseult's death redeems her errors. You remember how she 
 was led half senseless to Tristan's death-chamber— tors Vcm-
 
 ' His Lady Smiles ; Delight is in her Fate.' 31fi 
 
 brasse de ses bras, taut comme elle peut, et gette ung sourpir, ct se 
 pasme sur le corps, et le cueur lui part, et I'dme s'en va? 
 
 1 If every woman who loses her lover could die like that,' said 
 Jessie, with a curious glance at Christabel, who sat listening smil- 
 ingly to the conversation, with the Baron prostrate at her feet. 
 
 ' Instead of making good her loss at the earliest opportunity, 
 what a dreary place this world would be,' murmured little 
 Monty. ' I tbink somebody in the poetic line has observed that 
 nothing in Nature is constant, so it would be hard lines upon 
 women if they were to be fettered for life by some early attach- 
 ment that came to a bad end.' 
 
 'Look at Juliet's constancy,' said Miss St. Aubyn. 
 
 ' Juliet was never put to the test,' answered FitzJesse. ' The 
 whole course of her love affair was something less than a week. 
 If that potion of hers had failed, and she had awakened safe 
 and sound in her own bedchamber next morning, who knows 
 that she would not have submitted to the force of circumstances, 
 married County Paris, and lived happily with him ever after. 
 There is only one perfect example of constancy in the whole 
 realm of poetry, and that is the love of Paolo and Francesca, the 
 love which even the pains of hell could not dissever.' 
 
 ' They weren't married, don't you know,' lisped Monty. 
 ' They hadn't had the opportunity of getting tired of each other. 
 And then, in the under- world, a lady would be glad to take up 
 with somebody she had known on earth : just as in Australia 
 one is delighted to fall in with a fellow one would'nt caie two- 
 pence for in Bond Street.' 
 
 ' I believe you are right,' said Mr. FitzJesse, ' and that con- 
 stancy is only another name for convenience. Married people 
 are constant to each other, as a rule, because there is such an in- 
 fernal row when they fall out.' 
 
 Lightly flew the moments in the balmy air, freshened by the 
 salt sea, warmed by the glory of a meridian sun — lightly and 
 happily for that wise majority of the revellers, whose philosophy 
 is to get the most out of to-day's fair summer-time, and to leave 
 future winters and possible calamities to Jove's discretion. Jessie 
 watched the girl who had grown up by her side, whose every 
 thought she had once known, and wondered if this beautiful 
 artificial impersonation of society tones and society graces could 
 be verily the same flesh and blood. What had made this 
 wondrous transformation? Had Christabel's very soul under- 
 gone a change during that dismal period of apathy last winter 1 
 bhe had awakened from that catalepsy of despair a new woman 
 — eager for frivolous pleasures — courting admiration — studious 
 of effect : the very opposite of that high-souled and pure-minded 
 girl whom Jessie had known and loved. 
 
 ' It is the most awful moral wreck that was ever seen, j 
 thought .Jessie; 'but if my love can save her from deeper 
 degradation she shall be saved.'
 
 316 Mount Royal. 
 
 Could she care for that showy impostor posed at her feet, 
 gazing up at her with passionate eyes — hanging on her accents— 
 openly worshipping her 1 She seemed to accept his idolatry, ttj 
 sanction his insolence ; and all her friends looked on, half scorn- 
 ful, half amused. 
 
 ' What can Tregonell be thinking about not to be here to- 
 day 1 " said Jack Vandeleur, close to Jessie's elbow. 
 
 ' "Why should he be here 1 ' she asked. 
 
 ' Because he's wanted. lie's neglecting that silly woman 
 shamefully.' 
 
 'It is only his way,' answered Jessie, scornfully. ' Last year 
 he invited Mr. Hamleigh to Mount Royal, who had been engaged 
 to his wife a few years before. He is not given to jealousy.' 
 
 ' Evidently not,' said Captain Vandeleur, waxing thoughtful, 
 as he lighted a cigarette, and strolled slowly off to stare at the 
 sea, the rocky pinnacles, and yonder cormorant skimming away 
 from a sharp point, to dip and vanish in the green water. 
 
 The pilgrimage from Trevena to Trevitliy farm was some- 
 what less straggling than the long walk by the cliffs. The way 
 was along a high road, which necessitated less meandering, but 
 the party still divided itself into twos and threes, and Christabel 
 still allowed de Cazalet the privilege of a tcte-a-tcte. She was a 
 better walker than any of her friends, and the Baron was a 
 practised pedestrian ; so those two kept well ahead, leaving the 
 rest of the party to follow as they pleased. 
 
 ' I wonder they are not tired of each other by this time,' said 
 Mopsy, whose Wurtemburg heels were beginning to tell upon 
 her temper. ' It has been such a long day — and such a long 
 walk. What can the Baron find to talk about all this time % ' 
 
 ' Himself,' answered Fitz.Jesse, ' an inexhaustible subject 
 Men can always talk. Listening is the art in which they fail. 
 Are you a good listener, Miss Vandeleur 1 ' 
 
 ' I'm afraid not. If any one is prosy I begin to think of my 
 frocks.' 
 
 ' Very bad. As a young woman, with the conquest of society 
 before you, I most earnestly recommend yju to cultivate the 
 listener's art. Talk just enough to develop your companion's 
 powers. If he has a hobby, let him ride it. Be interested, be 
 sympathetic. Do not always agree, but differ only to be con- 
 vinced, argue only to be converted. Never answer at random, 
 or stifle a yawn. Be a perfect listener, and society is open to 
 you. P iople will talk of you as the most intelligent girl they know.' 
 
 Wopsy smiled a sickly smile. The ?gony of those ready-made 
 boots, just a quarter of a size too smal 1 though they had seemed 
 so comfortable in the shoemaker's shop, was increasing momen- 
 tarily. Here was a hill like the side of a house to be descended. 
 Poor Mopsy felt as if she were balancing herself on the points of 
 her toes. She leant feebly on her umbrella, while the editor of 
 the Sling trudged sturdily by her side, admiring the landscarje^-
 
 ' I2is Lady Smiles; Delight is in lier Face.' 317 
 
 stopping half-way clown the hill to point out the grander features 
 of the scene with his bamboo. Stopping was ever so much worse 
 than going on. It was as if the fires consuming the martyr at 
 the stake had suddenly gone out, and left him with an acuter 
 consciousness of his pain. 
 
 ' Too, too lovely,' murmured Mopsy, heartily wishing herself 
 in the King's Road, Chelsea, within hail of an omnibus. 
 
 She hobbled on somehow, pretending to listen to Mr. Fitz- 
 Jesse's conversation, but feeling that she was momentarily de- 
 nonstrating her incompetence as a listener, till they came to the 
 farm, where she was just able to totter into the sitting-room, 
 and sink into the nearest chair. 
 
 ' I'm afraid you're tired,' said the journalist, a sturdv block 
 of a man, who hardly knew the meaning of fatigue. 
 
 'I am just a little tired,' she faltered hypocritically, 'but it 
 fas been a lovely walk.' 
 
 They were the last to arrive. The tea things were ready upon 
 a table covered with snowy damask — a substantial tea, including 
 home-made loaves, saffron-coloured cakes, jam, marmalade, and 
 cream. But there was no one in the room except Mrs. Fait fax 
 Torrington, who had enthroned herself in the most comfortable 
 chair, by the side of the cheerful fire. 
 
 ' All the re&t of our people have gone straggling off to look at 
 things,' she said, ' some to the Kieve — and as that is a mile off we 
 shall have ever so long to wait for our tea.' 
 
 ' Do you think we need wait very long V asked Mopsy, whose 
 head was aching from the effects of mid-day champagne ; 'would 
 it be so very bad if we were to ask for a cup of tea.' 
 
 ' I am positively longing for tea,' said Mrs. Torrington to 
 FiteJesse, ignoring Mopsy. 
 
 ' Then I'll ask the farm people to brew a special pot for you 
 two,' answered the journalist, ringing the bell. ' Here comes 
 Mr. Tregonell, game-bag, dogs, and all. This is more friendly 
 than I expected.' 
 
 Leonard strolled across the little quadrangular garden, and 
 came in at the low door, as Mr. FitzJesse spoke. 
 
 ' I thought I should find some of you here,' he said ; ' where 
 are the others ? ' 
 
 Gone to the Kieve, most of them,' answered Mrs. Torrington, 
 briskly. Her freshness contrasted cruelly with Mopsy 's limp and 
 exhausted condition. ' At least I know your wife and de Cazalet 
 were bent on goingthere. She had promised how the waterfall. 
 We were just debating whether we ought to wait tea for them.' 
 
 'I wouldn't, if I were you,' said Leonard. ' Ko doubt they'll 
 take their time.' 
 
 He flung down his game-bag, took up his hat, whistled to I. is 
 dogs, and went towards the door. 
 
 1 Won't you stop and have some tea -just to keej> as in 
 countenance 1 ' asked Mrs. Torrington.
 
 818 Mount Boijal. 
 
 ' No, thanks. I'd rather have it later. I'll go and m cut lie 
 others.' 
 
 'If he ever intended to look after her it was certainly time 
 he should begin,' said the widow, when the door was shut u}>on 
 her host. ' Please ring again, Mr. Fit?; Jesse. How slow these 
 farm people are ! Do they suppose we have come here to stare 
 at cups and saucers 1 ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 ' LOVE BORE SUCH BITTER AND SUCH DEADLY FRUIT.' 
 
 Leonard Tregonell went slowly up the steep narrow lane wic| 
 his dogs at his heels. It was a year since he had been this way. 
 Good as the cover round about the waterfall was said to be for 
 woodcock, he had carefully avoided the spot this season, and his 
 friends had been constrained to defer to his superior wisdom as a 
 son of the soil. He had gone farther afield for his sport, and, as 
 there had been no lack of birds, his guests had no reason for 
 complaint. Yet Jack Vandeleur had said more than once, ' I 
 wonder you don't toy the ELieve. We shot a lot of birds there 
 last year.' 
 
 Now for the first time since that departed autumn he went 
 up the hill to one of the happy hunting-grounds of his boyhood. 
 The place where he had fished, and shot, and trapped birds, and 
 hunted water-rats, and climbed and torn his clothes in the care- 
 less schoolboy days, when his conception of a perfectly blissful 
 existence came as near as possible to the life of a North American- 
 Indian. He had always detested polite society and book-learning ; 
 but he had been shrewd enough and quick enough at learning 
 the arts he loved : — gunnery — angling — veterinary surgery. 
 
 He met a group of people near the top of the hill — all the 
 party except Christabel and the Baron. One glance showed him 
 that these two were missing from the cluster of men and women 
 crowding through the gate that opened into the lane. 
 
 ' The waterfall is quite a shabby affair,' said Miss St. Aubyn; 
 ' there has been so little rain lately, I felt ashamed to show Mr. 
 Faddie such a poor little dribble.' 
 
 ' We are all going back to tea,' explained her mother. ' 1 
 don't know what has become of Mrs. Tregonell and the Baron, 
 but I suppose they are loitering about somewhere. Perhaps 
 you'll tell them we have all gone on to the farm.' 
 
 ' Yes, I'll send them after you. I told my wife I'd meet her 
 at the Kieve, if I could.' 
 
 lie passed them and ran across the ploughed field, while the 
 others went down the hill, talking and laughing. He heard the 
 6ound of their voices and that light laughter dying away on the
 
 'Love bore such Bitter and such Deadly Fruit? 319 
 
 still air as the distance widened between him and them ; and he 
 wondered if they were talking of his wife, and of his seeming 
 indifference to her folly. The crisis had come. He had watched 
 her in blank amazement, hardly able to believe his own senses, 
 to realize the possibility of guilt on the part of one whose very 
 perfection had. galled him ; and now he told himself there was 
 no doubt of her folly, no doubt that this tinselly pretender 
 had fascinated her, and that she was on the verge of destruction. 
 No woman could outrage propriety as she had been doing of late, 
 and yet escape danger. The business must be stopped somehow, 
 even if he were forced to kick the Baron out of doors, in order 
 to make an end of the entanglement. And then, what if she 
 were to lift up her voice, and accuse him — if she were to turn 
 that knowledge which he suspected her of possessing, against 
 him ? What then 1 He must face the situation, and pay the 
 penalty of what he had done. That was all. 
 
 ' It can't much matter what becomes of me/ he said to himself 
 'I have never had an hour's real happiness since I married her. 
 She warned me that it would be so — warned me against my own 
 jealous temper — but I wouldn't listen to her. I had nryown way. 
 Could she care for that man ? Could she 1 In spite of the 
 coarseness of his own nature, there was in Leonard's mind a 
 deep-rooted conviction of his wife's purity, which was stronger 
 even than the evidence of actual facts. Even now, although the 
 time had come when he must act, he had a strange confused 
 feeh'ng, like a man whose brain is under the influence of some 
 narcotic, which makes him see things that are not. He felt as in 
 some hideous dream — long-involved — a maze of delusion and 
 bedevilment, from which there was no escape. 
 
 He went down into the hollow. The high wooden gate stood 
 wide open — evidence that there was some one lingering below. 
 The leaves were still on the trees, the broad feathery ferns were 
 still green. There was a low yellow light gleaming behind the 
 ridge of rock and the steep earthy slope above. The rush of the 
 water sounded loud and clear in the silence. 
 
 Leonard crept cautiously down the winding moss-grown 
 track, holding his dogs behind him in a leash, and constraining 
 those well-mannered brutes to perfect quiet. He looked down 
 into the deep hollow, through which the water runs, and over 
 which there is that narrow foot bridge, whence the waterfall is 
 seen in all its beauty — an arc of silvery light cleaving the dark 
 rock above, and flashing down to the dark rock below. 
 
 Christabel was standing on the bridge, with de Cazalet at her 
 side. They were not looking up at the waterfall. Their faces 
 were turned the other way, to the rocky river bed, fringed with 
 fern and wild rank growth of briar and weed. The Baron was 
 talking ear nestly, his head bent over Christabel, till it seemed to 
 those fin iou 8 eyes staring between the leafage, as if his lips must be 
 touching her face. Hi? hand clasped hers. That was plain enough.
 
 320 Mount Royal. 
 
 Just then the spaniel stirred, and rustled the dank dead 
 leaves — Christabel started, and looked up towards the trees that 
 screened her husband's figure. A guilty start, a guilty look, 
 Leonard thought. But those eyes of hers could not pierce the 
 leafy screen, and they drooped again, looking downward at the 
 water beneath her feet. She stood in a listening attitude, as if 
 her whole being hung upon de Cazalet's words. 
 
 What was he pleading so intensely ? What was that honeyed 
 speech, to which the false wife listened, unresistingly, motionless 
 as the bird spell- bound by the snake. ' So might Eve have 
 listened to the first tempter. In just such an attitude, with just 
 such an expression, every muscle relaxed, the head gently 
 drooping, the eyelids lowered, a tender smile curving the lips — 
 the first tempted wife might have hearkened to the silver-sweet 
 tones of her seducer. 
 
 'Devil ! ' muttered Leonard between his clenched teeth. 
 
 Even in the agony of his rage — rage at finding that this open 
 folly which he had pretended not to see, had been but the light and 
 airy prelude to the dark theme of secret guilt — that wrong 
 which he felt most deeply was his wife's falsehood to herself — her 
 wilful debasement of her own noble character. He had known 
 her, and believed in her as perfect and pure among women, and 
 now he saw her deliberately renouncing all claim to man's 
 respect, lowering herself to the level of the women who can be 
 tempted. He had believed her invulnerable. It was as if 
 Diana herself had gone astray — as if the very ideal and arche- 
 type of purity among women had become perver>od. 
 
 He stood, breathless almost, holding back his dogs, gazing, 
 listening with as much intensity as if only the senses of hearing 
 and sight lived in him — and all the rest were extinct. He saw 
 the Baron draw nearer and nearer as he urged his prayer — who 
 could doubt the nature of that prayer — until the two figures 
 were posed in one perfect harmonious whole, and then his arm 
 stole gently round the slender waist. 
 
 Christabel sprang away from him with a coy laugh. 
 
 ' Not now,' she said, in a clear voice, so distinct as to reach 
 that listener's ears. ' I can answer nothing now. To-mono w.' 
 
 ' But, my soul, why delay 1 ' 
 
 ' To-morrow,' she repeated ; and then she cried suddenly, 
 ' hark ! there is some one close by. Did you not hear ? ' 
 
 There had been no sound but the waterfall—not even the 
 faintest rustle of a leaf. The two dogs crouched submissively at 
 their master's feet, while that master himself stood motionless 
 as a stone figure. 
 
 'I must go,' cried Christabel. 'Think how long _ we have 
 stayed behind the others. We shall set people wondering.' 
 
 She sprang lightly from the bridge to the bank, and came 
 quickly up the rocky path, a narrow winding track, which closely 
 skirted the spot where Leonard stood concealed by the broad
 
 • Love bore such Bitter and such Deadly FruiV 321 
 
 loaves of a chestnut. She might almost have heard his hurried 
 breathing, she might almost have seen the lurid eyes of his dogs, 
 gleaming athwart the rank under-growth ; but she stepped 
 tightly past, and vanished from the watcher's sight. 
 
 De Cazalet followed. 
 
 ' Christabel, stop,' he exclaimed ; ' I must have your answer 
 now. My fate hangs upon your words. You cannot mean to 
 throw me over. I have planned everything. In three days we 
 ahall be at Pesth — secure from all pursuit.' 
 
 He was following in Christabel's track, but he was not 
 swift enough to overtake her, being at some disadvantage 
 upon that slippery way, where the moss-grown slabs of rock 
 tillered a very insecure footing. As he spoke the last words 
 Christabel's figure disappeared among the trees upon the higher 
 ground above him, and a broad herculean hand shot out of the 
 leafy background, and pinioned him. 
 
 ' Scoundrel — profligate — impostor ! ' hissed a voice in his ear, 
 and Leonard Tregonell stood before him — white, panting, with 
 flecks of foam upoa his livid lips. ' Devil ! you have corrupted 
 and seduced the purest woman that ever lived. You shall 
 answer to me — her husband — for your infamy.' 
 
 ' Oh ! is that your tune ? ' exclaimed the Baron, wrenching 
 his arm from that iron grip. They were both powerful men — 
 fairly matched in physical force, cool, hardened by rough living. 
 ' Is that your game ? I thought you didn't mind.' 
 
 ' You dastardly villain, what did you take me for 1 ' 
 
 ' A common product of nineteenth-century civilization, 1 
 answered the other, coolly. 'One of those liberal-minded 
 husbands who allow their wives as wide a bcense as they claim 
 for themselves.' 
 
 ' Liar,' cried Leonard, rushing at him with his clenched fist 
 raised to strike. 
 
 The Baron caught him by the wrist — held him with fingers 
 of iron. 
 
 'Take care,' he said. 'Two can play at that game. If it 
 comes to knocking a man's front teeth down his throat I may as 
 well tell you that I have given the 'Frisco dentists a good bit of 
 work in my time. You forget that there's no experience of a 
 rough-and-ready life that you have had which I have not gone 
 through tw T ice over. If I had you in Colorado we'd soon wipe 
 off this little score with a brace of revolvers.' 
 
 ' Let Cornwall be Colorado for the nonce. We could meet 
 here as easily as we could meet in any quiet nook across the 
 Channel, or in the wilds of America. No time like the present 
 —no spot better than this.' 
 
 ' If we had only the barkers,' said do Cazalet, ' but 
 unluckily we haven't.' 
 
 - ' I'll meet you here to-morrow at daybreak — pay, sharp 
 csveti. We can arrange about the pistols to-night. Vandeleur 
 
 Y
 
 322 Mount Royal 
 
 will come with me — he'd run any risk to serve me— and I dare 
 lay you could get little Monty to do as much for you. He's a 
 good plucked one.' 
 
 ' Do you mean it?' 
 
 ' Unquestionably.' 
 
 4 Very well. Tell Vandeleur what you mean, and let him 
 settle the details. In the meantime we can take things quietly 
 before the ladies. There is no need to scare any of them.' 
 
 ' I am not going to scare them. Down, Termagant,' said 
 Leonard to the Irish setter, as the low light blanches of a 
 neighbouring tree were suddenly stirred, and a few withered 
 leaves drifted down from the rugged bank above the spot where 
 the two men were standing. 
 
 ' Well, I suppose you're a pretty good shot,' said the B.iron, 
 coolly, taking out his cigar-case, ' so there'll be no disparity. 
 By-the-by there was a man killed here last year, I heard — a 
 former rival of yours.' 
 
 'Yes, there was a man killed here,' answered Leonard, 
 walking slowly on. 
 
 ' Perhaps you killed him ? ' 
 
 ' I did,' answered Leonard, turning upon him suddenly. ' I 
 killed him : as I hope to kill you : as I would kill any man 
 who tried to come between me and the woman I loved. He was 
 a gentleman, and I am sorry for him. He fired in the air, and 
 made me feel like a murderer. He knew how to make that last 
 score. I have never had a peaceful moment since I saw him 
 fall, face downward, on that broad slab of rock on the other side 
 of the bridge. You see I am not afraid of you, or I shouldn't 
 tell you this.' 
 
 ' I suspected as much from the time I heard the story,' said 
 de Cazalet. ' I rarely believe in those convenient accidents 
 which so often dispose of inconvenient people. But don't you 
 think it might be better for you if we were to choose a different spot 
 for to-morrow's meeting ? Two of your rivals settled in the same 
 Sully might look suspicious — for I daresay you intend to kill me.' 
 
 ' I shall try,' answered Leonard. 
 
 ' Then suppose we were to meet on those sands — Trebarwith 
 sands, I think you call the place. Not much fear of interrup- 
 tion there, I should think, at seven o'clock in the morning.' 
 
 ' You can settle that and everything else with Vandeleur.' 
 said Leonard, striding off with his dogs, and leaving the Baix>n 
 to follow at his leisure.' 
 
 De Cazalet walked slowly back to the farm, meditating deeply. 
 
 ' It's devilish unlucky that this should have happened,' he 
 Raid to himself. An hour ago everything was going on velvet. 
 We might have got quietly away to-morrow — for I know she 
 meant to go, cleverly as she fenced with me just now — and left 
 my gentlemen to his legal remedy, which would have secured 
 the lady and her fortune to me, as soon as the Divorce Court
 
 ' Love bore such Bitter and audi Deadly Fruit/ 323 
 
 business was over. He would have followed us with the idea 
 if fighting, no doubt, but I should have known how to give 
 him the slip. And then we should have started in life with a 
 clean slate. Now there must be no end of a row. If I kill him 
 it will be difficult to get away — and if I bolt, how am I to be 
 sure of the lady ? Will she come to my lure when I call her ? 
 Will she go away with me, to-morrow? Yes, that will be my 
 only chance. I must get her to promise to meet me at Bodmin 
 Road Station in time for the Plymouth train — there's one starts 
 at eleven. I can drive from Trebarwith to Bodmin with a good 
 horse, take her straight through to London, and from London by 
 the first available express to Edinburgh. She shall know nothing 
 of what has happened till we are in Scotland, and then I can tell 
 her that she is a free woman, and my wife by the Scottish law, 
 — a bond which she can make as secure as she likes by legal and 
 religious ceremonies.' 
 
 The Baron had enough insight into the feminine character to 
 know that a woman who has leisure for deliberation upon the 
 verge of ruin is not very likely to make the fatal plunge. The 
 boldly, deliberately bad are the rare exceptions among woman- 
 kind. The women who err are for the most part hustled and 
 hurried into wrong-doing — hemmed round and beset by con- 
 flicting interests — bewildered and confused by false reasoning — 
 whirled in the Maelstrom of passion, helpless as the hunted hare. 
 
 The Baron had pleaded his cause eloquently, as he thought — 
 had won Christabel almost to consent to elope with him — but not 
 quite. She had seemed so near yielding, yet had not yielded. 
 She had asked for time — time to reflect upon the fatal step — and 
 reflection was just that one privilege which must not be allowed 
 to her. Strange, he thought, that not once had she spoken of her 
 son, the wrong she must inflict upon him, her agony at having 
 to part with him. Beautiful, fascinating although he deemed 
 her — proud as he felt at having subjugated so lovely a victim, it 
 seemed to de Cazalet that there was something hard and 
 desperate about her — as of a woman who went wrong deliberately 
 and of set purpose. Yet on the brink of ruin she drew back, 
 and was not to be moved by any special pleading of his to consent 
 to an immediate elopement. Vainly had he argued that the time 
 had come — that people were beginning to look askance — that 
 her husband's suspicions might be aroused at any moment. She 
 had been rock in her resistance of these arguments. But her 
 consent to an early flight must now be extorted from her. 
 Delay or hesitation now might be fatal. If he killed his man — 
 ind he had little doubt in his own mind that he should kill him 
 — it was essential that his flight should be instant. The days 
 were pasl when juries were disposed to look leniently upon 
 gentlemanly homicide. If he were caught red-handed, the 
 penalty of his crime would be no light one. 
 
 1 1 was a fool to consent to such a wild plan,' he told himself,
 
 324 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' I ought to have insisted upon meeting him on the other side of 
 the Channel. But to draw back now might look bad, and would 
 lessen my chance with her. No ; there is no alternative course. I 
 must dispose of him, and get her away, without the loss of an hour.' 
 
 The whole business had to be thought out carefully. Hi9 
 intent was deadly, and he planned this duel with as much 
 wicked deliberation as if he had been planning a murder. He 
 had lived among men who held all human life, except their own, 
 lightly, and to whom duelling and assassination were among the 
 possibilities of every-day existence. He thought how if he and 
 the three other men could reach that lonely bend of the coast 
 unobserved, they might leave the man who should fall lying on 
 the sand, with never an indication to point how he fell. 
 
 De Cazalet felt that in Vandeleur there was a man to be 
 trusted. He would not betray, even though his friend were 
 left there, dead upon the low level sand-waste, for the tide to 
 roll over him and hide him, and wrap the secret of his doom in 
 eternal silence. There was something of the freebooter in Jack 
 Vandeleur — an honour-among-thieves kind of spirit — which the 
 soul of that other freebooter recnr/nized and understood. 
 
 ' We don't want little Montagu, thought de Cazalet. • One 
 man will be second enough to see fair-play. The fuss and 
 formality of the thing can be dispensed with. That little 
 beggar's ideas are too insular — he might round upon me.' 
 
 So meditating upon the details of to-morrow, the Baron went 
 down the hill to the farm, where he found the Mount Royal 
 party just setting out on their howeward journey under the 
 shades of evening, stars shining faintly in the blue infinite above 
 them. Leonard was not among his wife's guests — nor had he 
 been seen by any of them since they met him at the field-gate, 
 an hour ago. 
 
 'He has made tracks for home, no doubt,' said Jack Vandeleur. 
 
 They went across the fields, and by the common beyond 
 Trevalga — walking briskly, talking merrily, in the cool evening 
 air ; all except Mopsy, from whose high-heeled boots there was 
 no surcease of pain. Alas ! those Wurtemburg heels, and the 
 boots j ust half a size too small for the wearer, for how many a 
 bitter hour of a woman's life have they to answer ! 
 
 De Cazalet tried in vain during that homeward walk to get 
 confidential speech with Christabel — he was eager to urge his 
 new plan — the departure from Bodmin Boad Station — but she 
 was always surrounded. He fancied even that she made it her 
 business to avoid him. 
 
 ' Coquette,' he muttered to himself savagely. ' They are all 
 alike. I thought she was a little better than lite rest ; but they 
 are all ground in the same mill.' 
 
 He could scarcely get a glimpse of her face in the twilight. 
 She was always a little way ahead, or a little way behind him — • 
 now with Jessie Bridgeman now with Emily St. Aubyn-^
 
 Love bore stick Bitter and such Deadly Fruit.' 325 
 
 skimming over the rough heathy ground, flitting from group to 
 group. When they entered the house she disappeared almost 
 instantly, leaving her guests lingering in the hall, too tired to 
 repair at once to their own rooms, content to loiter in the glow 
 and warmth of the wood fires. It was seven o'clock. They had 
 been out nearly nine hours. 
 
 ' What a dreadfully long day it has been 1' exclaimed Emily 
 St. Aubyn, with a stifled yawn. 
 
 ' Isn't that the usual remark after a pleasure party?' de- 
 manded Mr. FitzJesse. ' I have found the unfailing result of 
 any elaborate arrangement for human felicity to be an abnormal 
 lengthening of the hours ; just as every strenuous endeavour to 
 accomplish some good work for one's fellow-men infallibly 
 provokes the enmity of the class to be benefited.' 
 
 ' Oh, it has all been awfully enjoyable, don't you know,' said 
 Miss St. Aubyn ; ' and it was very sweet of Mrs. Tregoncll to 
 give us such a delightful day ; but I can't help feeling as if we 
 had been out a week. And now we have to dress for dinner, 
 which is rather a trial.' 
 
 ' Why not sit down as you are 1 Let us have a tailor-gown 
 and shooting-jacket dinner, as a variety upon a calico ball,' 
 suggested little Monty. 
 
 ' Impossible ! We should feel dirty and horrid,' said Miss St. 
 Aubyn. ' The freshness and purity of the dinner-table would 
 make us ashamed of our grubbiness. Besides, however could 
 we face the servants'? No, the effort must be made. Come, 
 mother, you really look as if you wanted to be carried upstairs.' 
 
 ' By voluntary contributions,' murmured FitzJesse, aside to 
 Miss Bridgeman. ' Briareus himself could not do it single- 
 handed, as one of our vivacious Home Bulers might say.' 
 
 The Baron de Cazalet did not appear in the drawing-room an 
 hour later when the house-party assembled for dinner. He sent 
 his hostess a little note apologizing for his absence, on the ground 
 of important business letters, which must be answered that 
 night ; though why a man should sit down at eight o'clock in 
 ths evening to write letters for a post which would not leave 
 Boscastle till the following afternoon, was rather difficult for any 
 one to understand. 
 
 • All humbug about those letters, you may depend,' said little 
 Monty, who looked as fresh as a daisy in his smooth expanse of 
 shirt-front, with a single diamond stud in the middle of it, like a 
 iighthouse in a calm sea. ' The Baron was fairly done— athlete 
 as he pretends to be — hadn't a leg to stand upon — came in limp- 
 ing. I wouldn't mind giving long odds that he won't show till 
 txwnorrow afternoon. It's a case of gruel and bandages for the 
 next twent) -four hours.' 
 
 Leonard uame into the drawing-room just in time to give his 
 arm to Mrs. St, Aubyn. He made himself more agreeable than 
 usual at dinner, as it seemed to that worthy matron — talked
 
 32G Mount Royal. 
 
 more — laughed louder — and certainly drank more than his wont. 
 The dinner was remarkably lively, in spite of the Baron'-; 
 absence ; indeed, the conversation took a new and livelier turn 
 upon that account, for everybody had something more or les.< 
 amusing to say about the absent one, stimulated and egged on 
 with quiet malice by Mr. FitzJesse. Anecdotes were told of his 
 self-assurance, his vanity, his pretentiousness. His pedigree was 
 discussed, and settled for — his antecedents — his married life, 
 were all submitted to the process of conversational vivisection. 
 
 'Bather rough on Mrs. Tregonell, isn't it?' murmured little 
 Monty to the fair Dopsy. 
 
 ' Do you think she really cares V Dopsy asked, incredulously. 
 
 'Don't you?' 
 
 ' Not a straw. She could not care for such a man as that, 
 after being engaged to Mr. Hamleigh.' 
 
 ' Hamleigh was better form, I admit — and I used to think 
 Mrs. T. as straight as an arrow. But I confess I've been 
 staggered lately.' 
 
 ' Did you see what a calm queenly look she had all the time 
 people were laughing at de Cazalet ? ' asked Dopsy. ' A woman 
 whocared onelittle bit for a man could not have taken itsoquietly.' 
 
 ' You think she must have flamed out — said something in 
 defence of her admirer. You forget your Tennyson, and how 
 Guinevere " marred her friend's point with pale tranquility.'' 
 Women are so deuced deep.' 
 
 ' Dear Tennyson ! ' murmured Dopsy,' whose knowledge of 
 the Laureate's works had not gone very far beyond ' The May 
 Queen,' and ' The Charge of the Six Hundred.' 
 
 It was growing late in the evening when de Cazalet showed 
 himself. The drawing-room party had been in very fair spirits 
 without him, but it was a smaller and a quieter party than 
 usual ; for Leonard had taken Captain Vandeleur off to his own 
 den after dinner, and Mr. Montagu had offered to play a fifty 
 game, left-handed, against the combined strength of Dopsy and 
 Mopsy. ChiAstabcl had been at the piano almost all the evening, 
 playing with a breadth and grandeur which seemed to rise 
 above her usual style. The ladies made a circle in front of the 
 fire, with Mr. Faddie and Mr. FitzJesse, talking and laughing 
 in a subdued tone, wdiile those grand harmonies of Beethoven's 
 rose and fell upon their indifferent, half admiring ears. 
 
 Christabel played the closing chords of the Funeral March of 
 a Hero as de Cazalet entered the room. He went straight to 
 the piano, and seated himself in the empty chair by her side. 
 She glided into the melancholy arpeggios of the Moonlight 
 Sonata, without looking up from the keys. They were a long 
 way from the group at the lire — all the length of the room lay in 
 deep shadow between the lamps on the mantelpiece and neigh • 
 1 'inning tables, and the candles upon the piano. Pianissin^o 
 music seemed to invite conversation.
 
 1 Love bore such Bitter and such Deadly Fruit.' 327 
 
 ' You have written your letters 1 ' she asked, lightly. 
 1 My letters were a fiction — I did not want to sit face to face 
 with your husband at dinner, after our conversation this after- 
 noon at the waterfall ; you can understand that, can't you, 
 Christabel. Don't— don't do that.' 
 
 ' What V she asked, still looking down at the keys. 
 
 ' Don't shudder when I call you by your Christian name — as 
 you did just now. Christabel, I want your answer to my ques- 
 tion of to-day. I told you then that the crisis of our fate had 
 come. I tell you so again to-night — more earnestly, if it is pos- 
 sible to be more in earnest than I was to-day. I am obliged to 
 speak to you here — almost within earshot of those people — 
 because time is short, and I must take the first chance that 
 offers. It has been my accursed luck never to be with you 
 alone — I think this afternoon was the first time that you and 
 I have been together alone since I came here. You don't 
 know how hard it has been for me to keep every word and look 
 within check — always to remember that we were before an 
 audience.' 
 
 ' Yes, there has been a good deal of acting,' she answered, quietly. 
 
 ' But there must be no more acting — no more falsehood. We 
 have both made up our minds, have we not, my beloved ? I 
 think you love me — yes, Christabel, I feel secure of your love. 
 You did not deny it to-day, when I asked that thrilling question 
 — those hidden eyes, the conscious droop of that proud head, 
 were more eloquent than words. And for my love, Christabel — 
 no words can speak that. It shall be told by-and-by in language 
 that all the world can understand — told by my deeds. The time 
 has come for decision ; I have had news to-day that renders 
 instant action necessary. If you and I do not leave Cornwall 
 together to-morrow, we may be parted for ever. Have you made 
 up your mind ? ' 
 
 ' Hardly,' she answered, her fingers still slowly moving over 
 the keys in those plaintive arpeggios. 
 
 ' What is your difficulty, dearest 1 Do you fear to face the 
 future with me 1 ' 
 
 ' I have not thought of the future.' 
 
 ' Is it the idea of leaving your child that distresses you i ' 
 
 ' I have not thought of him.' 
 
 1 Then it is my truth — my devotion which you doubt t ' 
 
 ' Give me a little more time for thought,' she said, still play- 
 ing the same sotto voce accompaniment to their speech. 
 
 ' I dare not ; everything must be planned to-night. I must 
 leave this house early to-morrow morning. There are imperative 
 reasons which oblige me to do so. You must meet me at Bodmin 
 Road Station at eleven — you must, Christabel, if our lives are to 
 be free and happy and spent together. Vacillation on your part 
 will ruin all my plans. Trust yourself to me, dearest — trust my 
 powei to .secure a bright and happy future. If you do not want
 
 32«5 Mount Royal. 
 
 to be parted from your boy take him with you, He shall be my 
 son. I will hold him for you against all the world.' 
 
 ' You must leave this house early to-morrow morning,' she 
 said, looking up at him for the first time. ' Why ? ' 
 
 ' For a reason which I cannot tell you. It is a business in 
 which some one else is involved, and I am not free to disclose 
 it yet. You shall know all later.' 
 
 ' You will tell me, when we meet at Bodmin Road.' 
 
 ' Yes. Ah, then you have made up your mind — you will be 
 there. My best and dearest, Heaven bless you for that sweet 
 consent.' 
 
 ' Had we not better leave Heaven out of the question 1 ' she 
 said with a mocking smile; and then slowly, gravely, deliberately, 
 she said, ' Yes, I will meet you at eleven o'clock to-morrow, at 
 Bodmin Road Station — and you will tell me all that has happened.' 
 
 ' What secret can I withhold from you, love — my second self 
 — the fairer half of my soul 1 ' 
 
 Urgently as he had pleaded his cause, certain as he had been 
 of ultimate success, he was almost overcome by her yielding. 
 It seemed as if a fortress which a moment before had stood up 
 between him and the sky — massive — invincible — the very type 
 of the impregnable and everlasting, had suddenly crumbled into 
 ruin at his feet. His belief in woman's pride and purity had 
 never been very strong : yet he had believed that here and there, 
 in this sinful world, invincible purity was to be found. But 
 now he could never believe in any woman again. He had 
 believed in this one to the last, although he had set himself to 
 win her. Even when he had been breathing the poison of his 
 florid eloquence into her ear — even when she had smiled at him, 
 a willing listener — there had been something in her look, some 
 sublime inexpressible air of stainless womanhood whicli had 
 made an impassable distance between them. And now she had 
 consented to run away with him : she had sunk in one moment 
 to the level of all disloyal wives. His breast thrilled with pride 
 and triumph at the thought of his conquest : and yet there was 
 a touch of shame, shame that she could so fall. 
 
 Emily St. Aubyn came over to the piano, and made an end 
 of all confidential talk. 
 
 ' Now you are both here, do give us that delicious little duet 
 of Lecocq's,' she said : ' we want something cheerful before we 
 disperse. Good gracious Mrs. Tregonell, how bad you look,' 
 cried the young lady, suddenly, ' as white as a ghost.' 
 
 ' I am tired to death,' answered Christabel, ' I could not sing 
 a note for the world.' 
 
 ' Really, then we mustn't worry you. Thanks so much for 
 that lovely Beethoven music — the " Andante " — or the " Pastorale " 
 — or the " Pathetique," was it not ? So sweet.' 
 
 ' Good night,' said ChristabeL ' You won't think me rude 
 if I am the first to go ? '
 
 'Love bore such Bitter and such Deadly F, ;:.'/.' u20 
 
 ' Not at all. We are all going. Pack up your woo!s, mother. 
 I know you have only been pretending to knit. We are all luJf 
 asleep. I believe we have hardly strength to crawl upstairs. 1 
 
 Candles were lighted, and Mrs. Tregonell and her guests dis- 
 persed, the party from the billiard-room meeting them in the hall. 
 
 These lighter-minded people, the drama of whose existence 
 was just now in the comedy stage, went noisily up to their rooms ; 
 but the Baron, who was usually the most loquacious, retired 
 almost in sdence. Nor did Christabel do more than bid her 
 guests a brief good-night. Neither Leonard nor his friend Jack 
 Vandeleur had shown themselves since dinner. Whether they 
 were still in the Squire's den, or whether they had retired to 
 their own rooms, no one knew. 
 
 The Baron's servant was waiting to attend his master. He 
 was a man who had been with de Cazalet in California, Mexico, 
 and South America — who had lived with him in his bachelorhood 
 and in his married life— knew all the details of las domestic 
 career, and had been faithful to him in wealth and in poverty, 
 knew all that there was to be known about him — the best and 
 the worst — and had made up his mind to hold by an employment 
 which had been adventurous, profitable, and tolerably easy, not 
 entirely free from danger, or from the prospect of adversity — 
 yet always hopeful. So thorough a scamp as the Baron must 
 always find some chance open to him — thus, at least, argued 
 Henri le Mescam, Ids unscrupulous ally. The man was quick, 
 clever — able to turn his hand to anything — valet, groom, cook, 
 courier — as necessity demanded. 
 
 ' Is Salathiel pretty fresh I ' asked the Baron. 
 
 ' Fit as a fiddle : he hasn't been out since you hunted him 
 four days ago.' 
 
 ' That's lucky. He will be able to go the pace to-morrow 
 morning. Have him harnessed to that American buggy of Mr. 
 Tregonell's at six o'clock.' 
 
 ' I suppose you know that it's hardly light at six.' 
 
 ' There will be quite enough light for me. Pack my smallest 
 portmanteau with linen for a week, and a second suit — no dress- 
 clothes— and have the trap ready in the stable-yard when the 
 clock strikes six. I have to catch a train at Launceston at 7.45. 
 You will follow in the afternoon with the luggage.' 
 To your London rooms, Sir ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. If you don't find me there you will wait for further 
 instructions. You may have to join me on the other side of the 
 channel/ 
 
 ' I hope so, Sir.' 
 
 1 Sick of England, already V 
 
 'Never cared much for it, Sir. I began to think I should 
 die of the dulness of this place.' 
 
 'Rather more luxurious than our old quarters at St. Heliers 
 ten ; >, when you were marker at Jewson's, while I was
 
 330 Mount Royal. 
 
 leaching drawing and lYench at the fashionable academies of the 
 island.' 
 
 'That was bad, Sir ; tout luxury isn't everything in life. A 
 man's mind goes to rust in a place of this kind.' 
 
 ' Well, there will not be much rust for you in future, I 
 believe. How would you like it if I were to take you back to 
 the shores of the Pacific ? ' 
 
 ' That's just what I should like, Sir. You were a king there, 
 and I was your prime minister.' 
 
 ' And I may be a king again — perhaps this time with a queen 
 — a proud and beautiful queen.' 
 
 ' Le Mescam smiled, and shrugged his shoulders: 
 
 ' The queenly element was not quite wanting in the past, Sir,' 
 he said . 
 
 • Pshaw, Henri, the ephemeral fancy of the hour. Such 
 chance entanglements as those do not rule a man's life.' 
 
 ' Perhaps not, Sir ; but I know one of those chance entangle- 
 ments made Lima unpleasantly warm for us ; and if, after you 
 winged Don Silvio, there hadn't been a pair of good horses 
 waiting for us, you might never have seen the outside of Peru.' 
 
 ' And if a duel was dangerous in Lima, it would be ten times 
 more dangerous in Cornwall, would it not, Henri 1 ' 
 
 ' Of course it would, Sir. But you are not thinking of any- 
 thing like a duel here — you can't be so mad as to think of it.' 
 
 ' Certainly not . A nd now you can pack that small port- 
 manteau, while I take a stretch. I sha'n't take off my clothes : 
 a man who has to be up before six should never trifle with his 
 feelings by making believe to go to bed.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 'she stood up in bitter case, with a pale yet 
 steady face.' 
 
 The silence of night and slumber came down upon the world, 
 shadow and darkness were folded round and about it. The 
 ticking of the old eight-day clock in the hall, of the bracket 
 clock in the corridor, and of half a dozen other time-pieces, con- 
 scientiously performing in empty rooms, took that solemn and 
 sepulchral sound which all clocks, down to the humblest Dutch- 
 man, assume after midnight. Sleep, peace, and silence seemed to 
 brood over all human and brute life at Mount Royal. Yet there 
 were some who had no thought of sleep that night. 
 
 In Mr. Tregonell's dressing-room there was the light of lamp 
 and fire, deep into the small hours. The master of the house 
 lolled, half-dressed, in an arm-chair by the hearth ; while his 
 friend, Captain Vandeleur, in smoking-jacket and slippers 
 \ounge-i with his back to the chimney-piece, and a cigarette 
 between his lips. A whisky little and a couple of siphons stood
 
 * She stood up in Bitter Case.'' 331 
 
 on a tray on the Squire's writing-table, an open pistol-case neai 
 at hand. 
 
 ' You'd better lie down for a few hours,' said Captain 
 Vandeleur. ' I'll call you at half-past five.' 
 
 ' I'd rather sit here. I may get a nap by-and-by perhaps. 
 You can go to bed if you are tired : I shan't oversleep myself.' 
 
 ' I wish you'd give up this business, Tregonell,' said his friend 
 with unaccustomed seriousness. ' This man is a dead shot. We 
 heard of him in Bolivia, don't you remember ? A man who has 
 spent half his life in shooting-galleries, and who has lived where 
 life counts for very little. Why should you stake your life 
 against his? It isn't even betting: you're good enough at big 
 game, but you've had very little pistol practice. Even if you 
 were to kill him, which isn't on the cards, you'd be tried foi 
 murder ; and where's the advantage of that 1 ' 
 
 'I'll risk it,' answered Leonard, doggedly, 'I saw him with 
 my wife's hand clasped in his — saw him with his lips close to he; 
 face — close enough for kisses — heard her promise him an answer 
 — to-morrow. By Heaven there shall be no such to-morrow for 
 him and for me. For one of us there shall be an end of all things.' 
 
 ' I don't believe Mrs. Tregonell is capable ' — began Jack, 
 thoughtfully mumbling his cigarette. 
 
 ' You've said that once before, and you needn't say it again 
 Capable ! Why, man alive, I saw them together. Nothing less 
 than the evidence of my own eyes would have convinced me. I 
 have been slow enough to believe. There is not a man or woman 
 in this house, yourself included, who has not, in his secret soul, 
 despised me for my slowness. And j'et, now, because there is a ques- 
 tion of a pistol-shot or two you fence round, and try to persuade 
 me that my wife's good name is immaculate, that all which you 
 have seen and wondered at for the last three weeks means nothing' 
 
 ' Those open flirtations seldom do mean anything,' said Jack, 
 rersuasively. 
 
 A man may belong to the hawk tribe and yet not be without 
 certain latent instincts of compassion and good feeling. 
 
 ' Perhaps not — but secret meetings do : what I saw at the 
 Kieve to-day was conclusive. Besides, the affair is all settled — 
 you and de Cazalet have arranged it between you. He is willing 
 that there should be no witness but you. The whole business 
 will rest a secret between us three ; and if we get quietly down 
 to the sands before any one is astir to see us no one else need 
 ever know what happened there.' 
 
 ' If there is bloodshed the thing must be known.' 
 
 ' It will seem like accident V 
 
 'True,' answered Vandeleur, looking at him searcningly ; 
 ' like that accident last year at the Kieve — poor Hamkigh'a 
 death. Isn't to-morrow the anniversary, by-the-by?' 
 
 ' Yes — the date has come round again.' 
 
 ' Dates have an awkward knack of doing that There is %
 
 332 Mount Royal. 
 
 cursed mechanical regularity in life which makes a man wish 
 himself in some savage island where there is no such thing as an 
 almanack,' said Vandeleur, taking out another cigarette. • If I 
 had been Crusoe, I should never have stuck up that post. I 
 should have been to glad to get rid of quarter-day.' 
 
 In Christabel's room at the other end of the long corridor 
 there was only the dim light of the night-lamp, nor was there 
 any sound, save the ticking of the clock and the crackling of the 
 cinders in the dying fire. Yet here there was no more sleep nor 
 peace than in the chamber of the man who was to wager his life 
 against the life of his fellow-man in the pure light of the dawn- 
 ing day. Christabel stood at her window, dressed just as she 
 had left the drawing-room, looking out at the sky and the sea, 
 and thinking of him who, at this hour last year, was still a part 
 of her life — perchance a watcher then as she was watching now, 
 gazing with vaguely questioning eyes into the illimitable pano- 
 rama of the heavens, worlds beyond worlds, suns and planetary 
 systems, scattered like grains of sand over the awful desert of 
 infinite space, innumerable, immeasurable, the infinitesimals of 
 the astronomer, the despair of faith. Yes, a year ago and he was 
 beneath that roof, her friend, her counsellor, if need were ; for 
 she had never trusted him so completely, never so understood and 
 realized all the nobler qualities of his nature, as in those last days, 
 after she had set an eternal barrier between herself and him. 
 
 She stood at the open lattice, the cold night air blowing upon 
 her fever-heated face ; her whole being absorbed not in deliberate 
 thought, but in a kind of waking trance. Strange pictures came 
 out of the darkness, and spread themselves before her eyes. She 
 saw her first lover lying on the broad flat rock at St. Nectan's 
 Kieve, face downward, shot through the heart, the water stained 
 with the life-blood slowly oozing from his breast. And then, 
 when that picture faded into the blackness of night, she saw her 
 husband and Oliver de Cazalet standing opposite to each other 
 on the broad level sands at Trebarwith, the long waves rising up 
 behind them like a low wall of translucent green, crested with 
 silvery whiteness. So they would stand face to face a few hours 
 hence. From her lurking-place behind the trees and brushwood 
 at the entrance to the Kieve she had heard the appointment 
 made — and she knew that at seven o'clock those two were to 
 meet, with deadliest intent. She had so planned it — a life for a life. 
 
 She had no shadow of doubt as to which of these two would 
 fall. Three months ago on the Eiffel she had seen the Baron's 
 skill as a marksman tested — she had seen him the wonder of the 
 crowd at those rustic sports — seen him perform feats which onlj 
 a man who has reduced pistol -shooting to a science would 
 attempt. Against this man Leonard Tregonell — good all-round 
 sportsman as he was — could have very little chance. Leonard 
 h;td always been satisfied with that moderate sk'lfulness which
 
 'She stood up in Bitter Case.* 333 
 
 comes easily and unconsciously. He had never given time and 
 labour to any of the arts he pursued — content to be able to hold 
 his own among parasites and flatterers. 
 
 ' A life for a life,' repeated Christabel, her lips moving dumbly, 
 her heart throbbing heavily, as if it were beating out those awful 
 words. ' A life for a life — the old law — the law of justice — G< id's 
 own sentence against murder. The law could not touch this 
 murderer — but there was one way by which that cruel deed 
 might be punished, and I found it.' 
 
 The slow silont hours wore on. Christabel left the window 
 shivering with cold, though cheeks, brow, and lips were burning. 
 She walked up and down the ruom for a long while, till the very 
 atmosphere of the room, nay, of the house itself, seemed unen- 
 durable. She felt as if she were being suffocated, and this sense 
 of oppression became so strong that she was sorely tempted -to 
 shriek aloud, to call upon some one for rescue from that stilling 
 vault. The feeling grew to such intensity that she flung on her 
 hat and cloak, and went quickly down stairs to a lobby-door 
 that opened into the garden, a little door which she had unbolted 
 many a night after the servants had locked up the house, in order 
 to steal out in the moonlight and among the dewy flowers, and 
 across the dewy turf to those shrubbery walks which had such a 
 mysterious look — half in light and half in shadow. 
 
 She closed the door behind her, and stood with the night 
 wind blowing round her, looking up at the sky ; clouds were 
 drifting across the starry dome, and the moon, like a storm- 
 beaten boat, seemed to be hurrying through them. The cold 
 wind revived her, and she began to breathe more freely. 
 
 ' I think I was going mad just now,' she said to herself. 
 
 And then she thought she would go out upon the hills, and 
 down to the churchyard in the valley. On this night, of all 
 nights, she would visit Angus Hamleigh's grave. It was lonsr 
 since she had seen the spot where he lay — since her return from 
 Switzerland she had not once entered a church. Jessie had re- 
 monstrated with her gravely and urgently — but without eliciting 
 any explanation of this falling off in one who had been hitherto 
 so steadfastly devout. 
 
 ' I don't feel inclined to go to church, Jessie,' she said, 
 coolly ; ' there is no use in discussing my feelings. I don't feel fit 
 for church ; and I am not going in order to gratify your idea of 
 what is conventional and correct.' 
 
 4 1 am not thinking of this in its conventional aspect — I have 
 always made light of conventionalities — but things must be in a 
 bad way with you, Christabel, when you do not feel fit for church.' 
 
 'Things are in a bad way with me,' answered Christabel, with 
 a dogged moodiness which was insurmountable. ' I never said 
 they were good.' 
 
 Thie surrender of old pious habits had given Jessie more 
 .uiiiasinesa than any other fact in Ohristabel's life. Her flirtation
 
 834 Mount Boya». 
 
 with the Baron must needs be meaningless frivolity, Jessie had 
 thought ; since it seemed hardly within the limits of possibility 
 that a refined and pure-minded woman could have any real pen- 
 chant for that showy adventurer ; but this persistent avoidance 
 of church meant mischief. 
 
 And now, in the deep dead-of -night silence, Christabel went 
 on her lonely pilgrimage to her first lover's grave. Oh, happy 
 summer day when, sitting by her side outside the Maidenhead 
 coach, all her own through life, as it seemed, he told her how, if 
 she had the ordering of his grave, she was to bury him in that 
 romantic churchyard, hidden in a cleft of the hill. She had not 
 forgotten this even amidst the horror of his fate, and had told 
 the vicar that Mr. Hamleigh's grave must be at Minster and no 
 otherwhere. Then had come his relations, suggesting burial- 
 places with family associations — vaults, mausoleums, the pomp 
 and circumstance of sepulture. But Christabel had been firm ; 
 and while the others hesitated a paper was found in the dead 
 man's desk requesting that he might be buried at Minster. 
 
 How lonely the world seemed in this solemn pause between 
 ni"ht and morning. Never before had Christabel been out alone 
 at°such an hour. She had travelled in the dead of the night, and 
 had seen the vague dim night- world from the window of a rail- 
 way carriage — but never until now had she walked across these 
 solitary hills after midnight. It seemed as if for the first time 
 in her life she were alone with the stars. 
 
 How difficult it was in her present state of mind to realize 
 that those lights, tremulous in the deep blue vault, were worlds, 
 and combinations of worlds— almost all of them immeasurably 
 greater than this earth on which she trod. To her they seemed 
 living watchers of the night— solemn, mysterious beings, looking 
 down at her with all-understanding eyes. She had an awful 
 feeling of their companionship as she looked up at them— a 
 mystic sense that all her thoughts— the worst and the best of 
 them — were being read by that galaxy of eyes. 
 
 Strangely beautiful did the hills and the sky— the indefinite 
 shapes of the trees against the edge of the horizon, the mysteri- 
 ous expanse of the dark sea— seem to her in the night silence. 
 She had no fear of any human presence, but there was an awful 
 feeling in being, as it were, for the first time in her life alone 
 with the immensities. Those hills and gorges, so familiar in all 
 phases of daylight, from sunrise to after set of sun, assumed 
 Titanic proportions in this depth of night, and were as strange to 
 her as if she had never trodden this path before. What was the 
 wind saying, as it came moaning and sobbing along the deep 
 gorge through which the river ran 1 — what did the wind say as 
 she crossed the narrow bridge which trembled under her light 
 footfall 1 Surely there was some human meaning in that long 
 minor wail, which burst suddenly into a wild unearthly shriek, 
 and then died away in a low sobbing tone, as of Borrow and paiu
 
 'She stood up in Bitter Case.' 335 
 
 that grew dumb from sheer exhaustion, and not because there 
 .vas any reniissisn of pain or sorrow. 
 
 With that unearthly sound still following her, she went up 
 the winding hill-side path, and then slowly descended to the 
 darkness of the churchyard — so sunk and sheltered that it seemed 
 like going down into a vault. 
 
 Just then the moon leapt from behind an inky cloud, and, in 
 that ghostly light, Christabel saw the pale grey granite cross 
 which had been erected in memory of Angus Hamleigh. It 
 stood up in the midst of nameless mounds, and humble slate 
 tablets, pale and glittering — an unmistakable sign of the spot 
 where her first lover lay. Once only before to-night had she 
 seen that monument, Absorbed in the pursuit of a Pagan scheme 
 of vengeance she had not dared to come within the precincts oi 
 the church, where she had knelt and prayed through all the. 
 sinless years of her girlhood. To-night some wild impulse had 
 brought her here — to-night, when that crime which she called 
 retribution was on the point of achievement. 
 
 She went with stumbling footsteps through the long grass, 
 across the low mounds, till she came to that beneath which 
 Angus Hamleigh lay. She fell like a lifeless thing at the foot of 
 the cross. Some loving hand had covered the mound of earth 
 with primroses and violets, and there were low clambering roses 
 all round the grave. The scent of sweetbriar was mixed with 
 the smell of earth and grass. Some one had cared for that grave 
 although she, who so loved the dead, had never tended it. 
 
 ' Oh, my love ! my love ! ' she sobbed, with her face upon 
 the grass and the primrose leaves, and her arms clasping the 
 granite ; ' my murdered love —my first, last, only lover — before 
 to-morrow's sun is down your death will be revenged, and my 
 life will be over ! I have lived only for that — only for that 
 Angus, my love, my love ! ' She kissed the cold wet grass more 
 passionately than she had ever kissed the dead face mouldering 
 underneath it. Only to the dead — to the utterly lost and gone — 
 is given this supreme passion — love sublimated to despair. From 
 the living there is always something kept back — something saved 
 and garnered for an after-gift — some reserve in the mind or the 
 heart of the giver ; but to the dead love gives all — with a wile, 
 self-abandonment which knows "ot restraint or measure. The 
 wife who, while this man yet lived, had been so rigorously true to 
 honour and duty, now poured into the deaf dead ears a reckless 
 avowal of love — love that had never faltered, never changed — love 
 that had renounced the lover,and had yet gone on lovingtothe end. 
 
 The wind came moaning out of the valley again with that 
 sharp human cry, as of lamentation for the dead. 
 
 'Angus!' murmured Christabel, piteously, 'Angus, can you 
 hear me 1 — do you know 1 ? Oh, my God ! is there memory or 
 understanding in the world where he has gone, or is it all a 
 dead blank ? Help me, my God t I have lost all the old sweet
 
 336 Mount Boijae. 
 
 illusions of faith — I have left off praying, hoping, believing — 1 
 have only thought of my dead — thought of death and of him till 
 all the living world grew unreal to me — and God and Heaven 
 were only like old half-forgotten dreams. Angus ! ' 
 
 For a long time she lay motionless, her cold hands clasping 
 the cold stone, her lips pressed upon the soft dewy turf, her face 
 buried in primrose leaves — then slowly, and with an effort, she 
 raised herself upon her knee3, and knelt with her arms encircling 
 the cross — that sacred emblem which had once meant so much for 
 her : but which, since that long blank interval last winter, seemed 
 to have lost all meaning. One great overwhelming grief had made 
 her a Pagan — thirsting for revenge — vindictive — crafty — stealthy 
 as an American Indian on the trail of his deadly foe — subtle as 
 Greek or Oriental to plan and to achieve a horrible retribution. 
 
 She looked at the inscription on the cross, legible in the 
 moonlight, deeply cut in large Gothic letters upon the grey stone, 
 filled in with dark crimson. 
 
 ' Vengeance is mine : I will repay, saith the Lord.' 
 Who had put that inscription upon the cross 1 It was not there 
 when the monument was first put up. Christabel remembered 
 going with Jessie to see the grave in that dim half-blank time 
 before she went to Switzerland. Then there was nothing but a 
 name and a date. And now, in awful distinctness, there appeared 
 those terrible words — God's own promise of retribution — the 
 claim of the Almighty to be the sole avenger of human wrongs. 
 
 And she, reared by a religious woman, brought up in the 
 love and fear of God, had ignored that sublime and awful 
 attribute of the Supreme. She had not been content to leave 
 her lover's death to the Great Avenger. She had brooded on 
 his dark fate, until out of the gloom of despair there had arisen 
 the image of a crafty and bloody retribution. 'Whoso sheddetk 
 man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' So runs the 
 dreadful sentence of an older law. The new, lovelier law, which 
 began in the after-glow of Philosophy, the dawn of Christianity, 
 bids man leave revenge to God. And she, who had once called 
 herself a Christian, had planned and plotted, making herself the 
 secret avenger of a criminal who had escaped the grip of the law. 
 
 ' Must he lie in his grave, unavenged, until the Day of 
 Judgment 1 ' she asked herself. ' God's vengeance is slow.' 
 
 An hour later, and Christabel, pale and exhausted, her gar- 
 ments heavy with dew, was kneeling by her boy's bed in the 
 faint light of the night-Lamp ; kneeling by him as she had knelt 
 a year ago, but never since her return from Switzerland- 
 praying as she had not prayed since Angus Hamleigh's death 
 After those long, passionate prayers, she rose and looked at tins 
 alumberer's face — her husband's face in little — but oh ! how pure 
 and fresh and radiant. God keep him from boyhood's sins of 
 ssli-iove and soJ^aidulgenco — from manhood's evil passions.
 
 * She stood up in Bitter Case." V-17 
 
 hatred Arid jealousy. All her life to come seemed too little to 
 be devoted to watching and guarding this beloved from the 
 encircling snares and dangers of life. Pure and innocent now 
 in this fair dawn of infancy, he n< stled in her arms— he chu 
 tier and believed in her. Whatbusim 3 had she with anv o 
 ires, or hopes — God having given her the sacred du 
 of maternity — the master-passion of motherly love 1 
 
 ' I have been mad ! ' she said to herself ; ' I have been living in a 
 ghastlydream:butGodhasawakenedme — God's word has cured me.' 
 
 God's word had come to her at the crisis of her life. A month 
 aero, while her scheme of vengeance seemed still far from fulfil- 
 ment, that awful sentence would hardly have struck so deeply. It 
 was on the very verge of the abyss that those familiar words caught 
 her; just when the naturalfaltering of her womanhood, upon the eve 
 of a terrible crime, made her most sensitive toasublimeinipression; 
 
 The first faint streak of day glimmered in the east, a pale 
 cold light, livid and ghostly upon the edge of the sea yondejr, 
 white and wan upon the eastward points of rock and headland, 
 when Jessie Bridgeman was startled from her light slumbers 
 by a voice at her bedside. She was always an early riser, and 
 it cost her no effort to sit up in bed, with her eyes wide open, 
 and all her senses or, the alert. 
 
 ' Christabel, what is the matter 1 Is Leo ill 1 ' 
 
 1 No, Leo is well enough. Get up and dress yourself quickly, 
 Jessie. I want you to come with me — on a strange errand ; but 
 it is something that must be done, and at once.' 
 
 ' Christabel, you are mad.' 
 
 1 No. I have been mad. I think you must know it — this is 
 the awakening. Come, Jessie.' 
 
 Jessie had sprung out of bed, and put on slippers and dressing 
 gown, without taking her eyes off Christabel. Presently she 
 felt her cloak and gown. 
 
 ' Why, you are wet through. Where have you been V 
 
 I To Angus Hamleigh's grave. Who put that inscription on 
 the cross 1 ' 
 
 'I did. Nobody seemed to care about his grave — no one 
 attended to it. I got to think the grave my own property, and 
 I might do as I liked with it.' 
 ' But those awful words ! What made you put them there V 
 
 I I wanted the man who killed him to be reminded that there 
 U an Avenger.' 
 
 ' Wash your face and put on your clothes as fast as you can. 
 
 ry momi at is of con lequence,' said Christabel. 
 
 She would explain nothing. Jessie urged her to take off 
 her wet cloak, to go and change her gown and shoes ; bu1 Bhe 
 refused with angry impatience. . 
 
 •There will be trhie enough for that aft< rward .' she - id ; 
 'what I have bo do will not take long, but it must be done at 
 once. Pray be quick.' 
 
 a
 
 83*5 Mount Royal. 
 
 Jessie struggled through her hurried toilet, and followed 
 Christabel along the corridor, without question or exclamation. 
 They went to the door of Baron de Cazalet's room. A light 
 shone under the bottom of the door, and there was the sound 
 of someone stirring within. Christabel knocked, and the door 
 was opened almost instantly by the Baron himself. 
 4 Is it the trap ? ' he asked. ' It's an hour too soon.' 
 'No, it is I, Monsieur de Cazalet. May I come in for a few 
 minutes ? I have something to tell you.' 
 
 ' Christabel— my ' He stopped in the midst of that eager 
 
 exclamation, at sight of the other figure in the back -ground. 
 
 He was dressed for the day — carefully dressed, like a man 
 who in a crisis of his life wishes 'to appear at no disadvantage. 
 His pistol-case stood ready on the table. A pair of candles, 
 burnt low in the sockets of the old silver candlesticks, and a 
 heap of charred and torn paper in the fender showed that the 
 Baron had been getting rid of superfluous documents. Christabel 
 went into the room, followed by Jessie, the Baron staring at 
 them both, in blank amazement. He drew an arm-chair near 
 the expiring fire, and Christabel sank into it, exhausted and 
 half fainting. 
 
 ' What does it all mean ? ' asked de Cazalet, looking at 
 Jessie, ' and why are you here with her ? ' 
 
 ' Why is she here ? ' asked Jessie. ' There can be no reason 
 except — - — ' 
 
 She touched her forehead lightly with the tips of her fingers. 
 Chi'istabel saw the action. 
 
 ' No, I am not mad, now,' she said ; ' I believe I have been 
 mad, but that is all over. Monsieur de Cazalet, you and my 
 husband are to fight a duel this morning, on Trebarwith sands.' 
 ' My dear Mrs. Tregonell, what a strange notion ! ' 
 ' Don't take the trouble to deny anything. I overheard your 
 conversation yesterday afternoon. I know everything.' 
 
 ' Would it not have been better to keep the knowledge to 
 yourself, and to remember your promise to me, last night ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, I remember that promise. I said I would meet you at 
 Bodmin Road, after you had shot my husband.' 
 
 'There was not a word about shooting your husband.' 
 ' No ; but the fact was in our minds, all the same — in yours 
 as well as in mine. Only there was one difference between us. 
 You thought that when you had killed Leonard I would run 
 away with you. That was to be your recompense for murder. I 
 mo uit that you should kill him, but that you should never see 
 lay face again. You would have served my purpose — you would 
 have been the instrument of my revenge !' 
 ' Christabel ! ' 
 
 ' Do not call me by that name — I am nothing to you — I never 
 coukl, under any possible phase of circumstances, be any nearer 
 lo yen than I am at this moment. From f> »-at to last I have been
 
 • She stood up in Bitter Case.' 3-39 
 
 acting a part When I saw you at that shooting match, on the 
 Riffel, I said to myself, " Here is a man, who in any encounter 
 with my husband, must be fatal." My husband killed the only 
 man I ever loved, in a duel, without witnesses — a duel forced 
 upon him by insane and causeless jealousy. Whether that meet- 
 ing was fair or unfair in its actual details, I cannot tell ; but at 
 the best it was more bke a murder than a duel. When, through 
 Miss Bridgeman's acuteness, I came to understand what that 
 meeting had been, I made up my mind to avenge Mr. Hamleigh'a 
 death. For a long time my brain was under a cloud — I could 
 think of nothing, plan nothing. Then came clearer thoughts, 
 and then I met you ; and the scheme of myrevenge flashed upon me 
 like a suggestion direct from Satan. I knew my husband's jealous 
 temper, and how easy it would be to fire a train tho-e, and I made my 
 plans with that view. You lent yourself very easily xo my scheme.' 
 
 'Lent myself V cried the Baron, indignantly ; and then with 
 a savage oath he said : ' I loved you, Mrs. Tregonell, and you 
 made me believe that you loved me.' 
 
 I let you make fine speeches, and I pretended to be pleased 
 at them,' answered Christabel, with supreme scorn. 'I think 
 that was all.' 
 
 ' No, madam, it was not all. You fooled me to the top of my 
 bent. What, those lovely looks,those lowered accents — all meant 
 nothing?Itwasalladelusion — an acted lie? You never cared for me V 
 
 ' No,' answered Christabel. • My heart was buried with the 
 dead. I never loved but one man, and he was murdered, as I 
 believed — and I made up my mind to avenge his murder. 
 " Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." 
 That sentence was in my mind always, when I thought of 
 Leonard Tregonell. I meant you to be the executioner. And 
 now — now — God knows how the light has come — but the God 
 I worshipped when I was a happy sinless girl, has called me out 
 of the deep pit of sin — called me to remorse and atonement. You 
 must not fight this duel. You must save me from this horrible 
 crime that I planned — save me and yourself from blood-guilti- 
 ness. You must not meet Leonard at Trebarwith.' 
 
 ' And stamp myself as a cur, to obbige you : after having 
 lent myself so simply to your scheme of vengeance, lend myself 
 as complacently to your repentance. No, Mrs. Tregonell, that is 
 too much to ask. I will be your bravo, if you like, since I took 
 the part unconsciously — but I will not brand myself with the 
 charge of cowardice — even for you.' 
 
 ' You fought a duel in South America, and killed your 
 adversary. Mr. FitzJesse told me so. Everybody knows that 
 you are a dead shot. Who can call you a coward for refusing to 
 shoot the man whose roof has sheltered you — who never injured 
 you — against whom you can have no ill-will.' 
 
 ' Don't be to-> sure of that. He is your husband. When I 
 camo to Mount lloyal, I camo resolved to win you.'
 
 840 Mtunt Boyal. ~"~ — 
 
 • Only because I had deceived you. The woman you admired 
 was a living lie. Oh, if you could have looked into my heart only 
 yesterday, you must have shrunk from me with loathing. When 
 I led you on to play the seducer's part, I was plotting murder — 
 murder which I called justice. I knew that Leonard waa 
 listening — 1 had so planned that he should follow us to the 
 Kieve. I heard his stealthy footsteps, and the rustle of the 
 boughs — you were too much engrossed to listen ; but all my 
 senses were strained, and I knew the very moment of his coming. 
 
 ' It was a pity you did not let your drama come to its natural 
 denouement,' sneered de Cazalet, furious with the first woman 
 who had ever completely fooled him. ' When your husband waa 
 dead — for there is not much doubt as to my killing him — you 
 and I could have come to an understanding. You must have 
 had some gratitude. However, I am not bloodthirsty, and since 
 Mrs. Tregonell has cheated me out of my devotion, fooled me 
 with day-dreams of an impossible future, I don't see that I 
 should gain much by shooting Mr. Tregonell.' 
 
 ' No, there would be no good to you in that profitless blood- 
 shed. It is I who have wronged you — I who wilfully deceived 
 you — degrading myself in order to lure my husband into a fatal 
 quarrel — tempting you to kill him. Forgive me, if you can — and 
 forget this wild wicked dream. Conscience and reason came 
 back to me beside that quiet grave to-night. What good could 
 it do him who lies there that blood should be spilt for his sake 1 
 Monsieur de Cazalet, if you will give up all idea of this duel I 
 will be grateful to you for the rest of my life.' 
 
 ' You have treated me very cruelly,' said the Baron, taking 
 both her hands, and looking into her eyes, half in despairing love, 
 half in bitterest anger ; ' you have fooled me as never man was 
 fooled before, I think — tricked me — and trifled with me — and I 
 owe you very little allegiance. If you and I were in South 
 America I would show you very little mercy. No, my sweet one, 
 I would make you play out the game — you should finish the 
 drama you began — finish it in my fashion. But in this world of 
 yours, hemmed round with conventionalities, I am obliged to let 
 you off easily. As for your husband — well, I have exposed my 
 life too often to the aim of a six-shooter to be called coward if I 
 let this one opportunity slip. He is nothing to me — or I to him — 
 since you are nothing to me. He may go — and I may go. I 
 will leave a line to tell him that we have both been the dupes of 
 a pretty little acted charade, devised by his wife and her friends — 
 and instead of going to meet him at Trebarwith, I'll drive 
 straight to Launceston, and catch the early train. Will that 
 satisfy you, Mrs. Tregonell 1 ' 
 
 ' I thank you with all my heart and soul — you have saved me 
 from myself.' 
 
 'You are a much better man than I thought you, Baron,' 
 laid Jessie, speaking for the first timo.
 
 * Srx stood up in Bitter Case.' 311 
 
 She had stood by, a quiet spectator of the scene, listening 
 intently, ready at any moment to come to Christabel's rescue, if 
 need were — understanding, for the first time, the moving springs 
 of conduct which had been so long a mystery to her. 
 
 ' Thank you, Miss Bridgeman. I suppose you were in the 
 plot— looked on and laughed in your sleeve, as you saw how a 
 man of the world may be fooled by sweet words and lovely looks.' 
 
 1 1 knew nothing. I thought Mrs. Tregonell was possessed 
 by the devil. If she had let you go on — if you had shot her 
 husband — I should not have been sorry for him — for I know he 
 killed a much better man than himself, and I am hard enough to 
 hug the stern old law — a life for a life. But I should have been 
 sorry for her. She is not made for such revenges.' 
 
 1 And now you will be reconciled with your husband, I sup- 
 pose, Mrs. Tregonell. You two will agree to forget the past, and 
 to live happily everwards ? ' sneered de Cazalet, looking up from 
 the letter which he was writing. 
 
 ' No ! there can be no f orgetf ulness for either of us. I have 
 to do my duty to my son. I have to win God's pardon for the 
 guilty thoughts and plans which have filled my mind so long. 
 But I owe no duty to Mr. Tregonell. He has forfeited every 
 claim. May I see your letter when it is finished ? ' 
 
 De Cazalet handed it to her without a word — a brief epistle, 
 written in the airiest tone, ascribing all that had happened at the 
 Kieve to a sportive plot of Mrs. Tregonell's, and taking a polite 
 leave of the master of the house. 
 
 ' When he reads that, I shall be half-way to Launceston,' he 
 said, as Christabel gave him back the letter. 
 
 ' I am deeply grateful to you, and now good-bye,' she said, 
 gravely, offering him her hand. He pressed the cold slim hand 
 in his, and gently raised it to his lips. 
 
 ' You have used me very badly, but I shall love and honour 
 you to the end of my days,' he said, as Christabel left him. 
 
 Jessie was following, but de Cazalet stopped her on the 
 threshold. 'Come,' he said, 'you must give me the clue to this 
 mystery. Surely you were in it — you, who know her so well, 
 must have known something of this ? ' 
 
 ' I knew nothing. I watched her with fear and wonder. 
 After — after Mr. Hamleigh's death — she was very ill — mentallj 
 ill ; she sank into a kind of apathy — not madness — but terribly 
 lear the confiness of madness. Then, suddenly, her spirits 
 fcemed to revive — she became eager for movement, amusement 
 — an utterly different creature from her former self. She and 
 I, who had been like sisters, seemed ever so far apart. I could 
 not understand this new phase of her character. For a whole 
 year she has been unlike herself — a terrible year. Thank God 
 this morning I have seen the old Christabel again.' 
 
 Half an hour afterwards the Baron's dogcart drove out of 
 the yard, and half an hour after his departure the Baron'*
 
 342 Mount Royal. 
 
 letter was delivered to Leonard Tregonell, who muttered an oal li as 
 he finished reading it, and then handed it to his faithful Jack. 
 ' What do you say to that 1 ' he asked. 
 
 ' By Jove, I knew Mrs. T was straight,' answered the 
 
 Captain, in his unsophisticated phraseology. 'But it was a 
 shabby trick to play you all the same. I daresay Mop and Dop 
 were in it. Those girls are always ready for larks.' 
 
 Leonard muttered something the reverse of polite about Dop 
 and Mop, and went straight to the stable-yard, where he cancelled 
 hisorderfor the trap which was tohave conveyed him to Trebarwith 
 Bands,and where he heard of the Baron's departure for Launceston. 
 
 Mystified and angry, he went straight upstairs to his wife's 
 room. All barriers were broken down now. All reticence was 
 at an end. Plainest words, straightest measures, befitted the pre- 
 sent state of things. 
 
 Christabel was on her knees in a recess near her bed — a recesa 
 which held a little table, with her devotional books and a prie- 
 dieu chair. A beautiful head of the Salvator Mundi, painted on 
 china at Munich, gave beauty and sanctity to this little oratory. 
 She was kneeling on the prie-dieu, her arms folded on the purple 
 velvet cushion, her head leaning forward on the folded arms, in 
 an attitude of prostration and self-abandonment, her hair falling 
 loosely over her white dressing-gown. She rose at Leonard's 
 entrance, and confronted him, a ghost-like figure, deadly pale. 
 
 ' Your lover has given me the slip,' he said, roughly ; ' why 
 didn't you go with him 1 You mean to go, I ha*— no doubt 
 You have both made your plans to that end — but you want to 
 sneak away — to get clear of this country, perhaps, before people 
 have found out what you are. Women of your stamp don't 
 mind what scandal they create, but they like to be out of the row.' 
 
 ' You are mistaken,' his wife answered, coldly, unmoved by 
 his anger, as she had ever been untouched by his love. ' The 
 man who left here this morning was never my lover— never 
 could have been, had he and I lived under the same roof for years. 
 But I intended him for the avenger of that one man whom I did 
 love, with all my heart and soul — the man you killed.' 
 
 ' What do you mean 1 ' faltered Leonard, with a dull grey 
 shade creeping over his face. 
 
 It had been in his mind for a long time that his secret was 
 suspected by his wife— but this straight, sudden avowal of the 
 fact was not the less a shock to him. 
 
 'You know what I mean. Did you not know when you 
 came back to this house that I had fathomed your mystery— that 
 I knew whose hand killed Angus Hamleigh. You did know it, 
 Leonard : you must have known : for you knew that I was not 
 a woman to fling a wife's duty to the winds, without some all- 
 sufficient reason. You knew what kind of wife I had been for 
 four dull, peaceful years— how honestly I had endeavoured to 
 perform the duty which I took upon myself in loving gratitude
 
 1 She stood up in Bitter Case.' 313 
 
 to your dear mother. Did you believe that I could change all 
 at once — become a heartless, empty-headed lover of pleasuie — 
 hold you, my husband, at arm's length — outrage propriety — c!efy 
 opinion — without a motive so powerful, a purpose so deadly and 
 so dear, that self-abasement, loss of good name, counted for 
 nothing with me.' 
 
 ' You are afool,' said Leonard, doggedly. ' No one at the inquest 
 so much as hinted at foul play. Why should you suspect any one ? ' 
 ' For more than one good reason. First, your manner on the 
 night before Angus Hamleigh's death — the words you and he 
 spoke to each other at the door of his room. I asked you then 
 if there were any quarrel between you, and you said no : but 
 even then I did not believe you.' 
 
 ' There was not much love between us. You did not expect 
 that, did you % ' asked her husband, savagely. 
 
 ' You invited him to you house ; you treated him as your 
 friend. You had no cause to distrust him or me. You must 
 have known that.' 
 
 ' I knew that you loved him.' 
 1 1 had been your faithful and obedient wife.' 
 ' Faithful and obedient ; yes — a man might buy faith and 
 obedience in any market. I knew that other man was master of 
 your heart. Great Heaven, can I forget how I saw you that 
 night, hanging upon his words, all your soul in your eyes.' 
 
 • We were talking of life and death. It was not his words 
 that thrilled me ; but the deep thoughts they stirred within me 
 — thoughts of the great mystery— the life beyond the veil. Do 
 you know what it is to speculate upon the life beyond this life, 
 when you are talking to a man who bears the stamp of death 
 upon his brow, who is as surely devoted to the grave as Socrates 
 was when he talked to his friends in the prison. But why do I 
 
 talk to you of these things ? You cannot understand ' 
 
 'No! I am outside the pale, am I not?' sneered Leonard; 
 'made of a different clay from that sickly sentimental worshipper 
 of yours, who turned to you when he had worn himself out i\ 
 the worship of balit* -girls. I was not half fine enough for you, 
 could not talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Was it a 
 pleasant sensation for me, do you think, to see you two sentimen- 
 talizing and poetizing, day after day — Beethoven here and Byron 
 there, and all the train of maudlin modern versifiers who have 
 made it their chief business to sap the foundations of domestic life. 
 ' Why did you bring him into your house ?' 
 ' Why ? Can't you guess ? Because I wanted to know 'he 
 utmost and the worst ; to watch you two together ; to see what 
 venom was left in the old poison ; to make sure, if I could, that 
 you were staunch ; to put you to the test.' 
 
 'God knows I never faltered throughout that ordeal,' sail 
 Christabel, solemnly. 'And yet you murdered him. You ask 
 nr- howl know of ihat murder. Shall I tell you? You were
 
 ;;j4 Mount Royal. 
 
 ; ' the Kieve that day ; you did not go by the beaten stack 
 where the ploughmen must have seen you. No ! you crept in 
 by stealth the other way — clambered over the rocks— ah ! you 
 start. You wonder how I know that. You tore your coat in 
 the scramble across the arch, and a fragment of the cloth was 
 caught upon a bramble. I have that scrap of cloth, and I have 
 the shooting jacket from which it was torn, under lock and key 
 in yonder wardrobe. Now, will you deny that you were at the 
 Kieve that day ? 
 
 ' No. I was there. Hamleigh met me there by appointment. 
 You were right in your suspicion that night. "We did quarrel- 
 not about you — but about his treatment of that Vandeleur girl. 
 
 I thought he had led her on — flirted with her— fooled her ' 
 
 ' You thought,' ejaculated Christabel, with ineffable scorn. 
 ' Well, I told him so, at any rate ; told him that he would 
 not have dared to treat any woman so scurvily, with her brother 
 and her brother's friend standing by, if the good old wholesome 
 code 'of honour had not gone out of fashion. I told him that 
 forty' years ago, in the duelling age, men had been shot for a 
 smaller offence against good feeling ; and then he rounded on 
 me, and asked me if I wanted to shoot him ; if I was trying to 
 provoke a quarrel ; and then — I hardly know how the thing 
 came about — it was agreed that we should meet at the Kieve at 
 nine o'clock next morning, both equipped as if for woodcock 
 shooting— game bags, dogs, and all, our guns loaded with swan- 
 shot, and that we should settle our differences face to face, in 
 that quiet hollow, without witnesses. If either of us dropped, 
 the thing would seem an accident, and would entail no evil 
 consequences upon the survivor. If one of us were only 
 wounded, why — — ' 
 
 ' But you did not mean that,' interrupted Christabel, with 
 flashing eyes,' ' you meant your shot to be fatal.' 
 
 ' It was fatal,' muttered Leonard. ' Never mind what I 
 meant. God knows how I felt when it was over, and that man 
 was lying dead on the other side of the bridge. I had seen 
 many a noble beast, with something almost human in the look 
 of him, go down before my gun; but I had never shot a man 
 before. Who could have thought there would have been so 
 much difference V 
 
 Christabel clasped her hands over her face, and drew back 
 with an involuntary recoil, as if all. the horror of that dreadful 
 scene were being at this moment enacted before her eyes. 
 Never had the thought of Angus Hamleigh's fate been out of 
 her mind in all the year that was ended to-day — this day — the 
 anniversary of his death. The image of that deed had been 
 ever before her mental vision, beckoning her and guiding her 
 along the pathway of revenge — a lurid light. 
 
 ' You murdered him,' she said, in low, steadfast tones. ' You 
 brought him to this house with evil intent — yes, with your mind
 
 'She stood up in Bitter Case 345 
 
 full of hatred and malice towards him. You acted the traitor's 
 base, hypocritical part, smiling at him and pretending friendship, 
 while in your soul you meant murder. And then, under this 
 pitiful mockery of a duel — a duel with a man who had never 
 injured you, who had no resentment against you — a duel upon 
 the shallowest, most preposterous pretence — you kill your friend 
 and your guest — you kill him in a lonely place, with none of the 
 guards of ordinary duelling ; and you have not the manhood 
 to stand up before your fellow-men, and say, " I did it.'" 
 
 ' Shall I go and tell them now 1 ' asked Leonard, his white 
 lips tremulous with impotent rage. ' They would hang me, most 
 likely. Perhaps (hat is what you want.' 
 
 'No, I never wanted that,' answered Christabel. 'For our 
 boy's sake, for the honour of your dead mother's name, I would 
 have saved you from a shameful death. But I wanted your life 
 — a life for a life. That is why I tried to provoke your jealousy 
 — why I planned that scene with the Baron yesterday. I knew 
 that in a duel between you and him the chances wi re all in his 
 favour. I had seen and heard of his skill. You fell easily into 
 the trap I laid for you. I was behind the bushes when you 
 challenged de Cazalet.' 
 
 ' It was a plot, then. You had been plotting my death all 
 that time. Your songs and dances, your games and folly, all 
 meant the same thing.' 
 
 ' Yes, I plotted your death as you did Angus Hamleigh's,' 
 answered Christabel, slowly, deliberately, with steady eyes fixed 
 on her husband's face; 'only I relented at the eleventh hour. 
 You did not.' 
 
 Leonard stared at her in dumb amazement. This new aspect 
 of his wife's character paralyzed his thinking powers, which had 
 never been vigorous. He felt as if, in the midst of a smooth 
 summer sea, he had found himself suddenly face to face with 
 that huge wave known on this wild northern coast, which, 
 generated by some mysterious power in the wide Atlantic, rolls on 
 its deadly course in overwhelmingmight;engulphing many a craft 
 which but a minute before was riding gaily on a summer sea. 
 
 ' Yes, you have cause to look at me with horror in your eyes,' 
 said Christabel. ' I have steeped my soul in sin ; I have plotted 
 your death. In the purpose and pursuit of my life I have been a 
 murderer. It is God's mercy that held me back from that 
 black gulf. What gain would your death have been to your 
 victim .' Would ho have slept more peacefully in his grave, or 
 have awakened happier on the Judgment Day 1 ? If he had 
 consciousness and knowledge in that dim mysterious world, he 
 would have been sorry for the ruin of my soul — sorry for Satan's 
 I i- over the woman he once loved. Last night, kneeling on 
 liis grave, these thoughts came into my mind for the first time. 
 1 think it was the fact of being near him — almost as if there was 
 some sympathy between the living and the dead. Leonard, J
 
 346 Mount Royal 
 
 know how wicked I have been. God pity and pardon me, and 
 make me a worthy mother for my boy. For you and me there 
 can be nothing but life-long parting.' 
 
 'Well, yes, I suppose there would not be much chance of 
 comfort or union for us after what has happened, ' said Leonard, 
 moodily ; ' ours is scarcely a case in which to kiss again with tears, 
 as your song says. I must be content to go my way, and 
 let you go yours. It is a pity we ever marriod ; but that was 
 my fault, I suppose. Have you any particular views as to your 
 future? I shall not molest you j but I should be glad to know 
 that the lady who bears my name is leading a reputable life.' 
 
 ' I shall live with my son — for my son. You need have no 
 fear that I shall make myself a conspicuous person iu the world. 
 I have done with life, except for him. I care very little where 
 I live: if you want Mount Royal for yourself, I can have the 
 old house at Penlee made comfortable for Jessie Bridgeman and 
 me. I dare say I can be as happy at Penlee as here.' 
 
 ' I don't want this house. 1 detest it. Do you suppose I am 
 going to waste my life in England — or in Europe ] Jack and I 
 can start on our travels again. The world is wide enough ; there 
 are two continents on which I have never set foot. I shall sta-t 
 for Calcutta to-morrow, if I can, and explore the whole of India 
 before I turn my face westwards again. I think we understand 
 each other fully now. Stay, there is one thing : I am to see my 
 son when, and as often as I please, I suppose.' 
 
 ' I will not interfere with your rights as a father.' 
 
 ' I am glad of that. And now I suppose there is no more to 
 be said. I leave your life, my honour, in your own keeping.' 
 
 ' God be with you,' she answered, solemnly, giving that part- 
 ing salutation its fullest meaning. 
 
 And so, without touch of lip or hand, they parted for a lifetime. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 WE HAVE DONE WITH TEARS AND TREASONS. 
 
 ' I wonder if there is any ancient crime in the Tregonell 
 family that makes the twenty-fifth of October a fatal date ; 
 Mopsy speculated, with a lachrymose air, on the afternoon 
 which followed the Baron's hasty departure. 'This very day 
 last year Mr. Hamleigh shot himself, and spoiled all our 
 pleasure ; and to-day, the Baron de Cazalet rushes away as 
 if the house was infected, Mrs. Tregonell keeps her own room 
 with a nervous headache, and Mr. Tregonell is going to carry 
 off Jack to be broiled alive in some sandy waste among 
 prowling tigers, or to catch his death of cold upon more of 
 those horrid mountains. One might just as well have no brother.' 
 ' If he ever sent us anything from abroad we shouldn't 
 feel his loss so keenly,' said Dopsy, in a plaintive voice, ' but he 
 doesn't. If he were to traverse the whole of Africa we shouldn't be 
 the richer by a single ostrich feather— and those uudyed natural
 
 We have clone with Tears and Treasons. ?47 
 
 ostriches are such good style. South America teems with gold 
 ami jewels ; Peru is a proverb ; but what are tee the better off 1 ' 
 
 ' it is rather bad form for the master of a house to start on 
 his travels before his guests have cleared out,' remarked Mopsy. 
 
 ' And an uncommonly broad hint for the guests to hasten the 
 clearing out process,' retorted Dopsy. ' I thought we were good 
 here for another month — till Christmas, perhaps. Christmas at 
 an old Cornish manor-house woidd have been too lovely — like 
 one of the shilling annuals.' 
 
 ' A great deal nicer,' said Mopsy, ' for you never met with a 
 country house in a Christmas book that was not peopled with 
 ghosts and all kind of ghastliness. 
 
 Luncheon was lively enough, albeit de Cazalet was gone, and 
 Mrs. Tregonell was absent, and Mr. Tregonell painfully silent. 
 The chorus of the passionless, the people for whom life means only 
 dressing and sleeping and four meals a day, found plenty to talk about. 
 
 Jack Vandeleur was in high spirits. He rejoiced heartily at 
 the turn which affairs had taken that morning, having from the 
 first moment looked upon the projected meeting on Trebarwith 
 sands as likely to be fatal to his friend, and full of peril for all 
 concerned in the business. 
 
 He was too thorough a free-lance, prided himself too much on 
 his personal courage and his recklessness of consequences, to offer 
 strenuous opposition to any scheme of the kind ; but he had not 
 faced the situation without being fully aware of its danger, and 
 he was very glad the thing had blown over without bloodshed or 
 law-breaking. He was glad also on Mrs. Tregonell's account, 
 very glad to now that this one woman in whose purity and 
 honesty of purpose he had believed, had not proved herself a 
 simulacrum, a mere phantasmagoric image of goodness and 
 virtue. Still more did he exult at the idea of re-visiting the 
 happy hunting-grounds of his youth, that ancient romantic world 
 in which the youngest and most blameless years of his life had been 
 spent. Pleasant to go back under such easy circumstances, with 
 Leonard's purse to draw upon, to be the rich man's guide, philo- 
 sopher, and friend, in a country which he knew thoroughly. 
 
 ' Pray what is the cause of this abrupt departure of da 
 Cazalet, and this sudden freak of our host's 1 ?' inquired Mrs. 
 Torrington of her next neighbour, Mr. FitzJesse, who wa i 
 calmly discussing a cutlet d la Maintenon, unmoved by the shrill 
 chatter of the adjacent Dopsy. ' I hope it is nothing wrong 
 with the drains.' 
 
 'No I am told the drainage is simply perfect.' 
 
 'People a mu h, til! typhoid fever brc ' i 
 
 out; and then it red that there is an aban 
 
 pool in direct communication with one of the spare bed-roo 
 or a forgotten drain-pipe under the drawn > floor. 1 never 
 
 ; they tell me their houses are wholesome. 
 It 1 smell an unpleasant smell I go,' Raid Mrs. Torrington.
 
 348 Mount Boyat. 
 
 ' There is often wisdom in flight/ replied the journalist ; 'but 
 I do not think this is a case of bad drainage.' 
 
 1 No more do I,' returned Mrs. Torrington, dropping her voice 
 and becoming confidential ; ' of course we both perfectly understand 
 what it all means. There has been a row between Mr. and Mrs. 
 Tregonell, and de Cazalet has got his congi from the husband. 
 
 ' I should have introduced him to the outside of my house 
 three weeks ago, had I been the Squire,' said FitzJesse. ' But 
 I.believe the flirtation was harmless enough, and I have a shrewd 
 idea it was what the thieves call a " put up " thing — done on 
 purpose to provoke the husband.' 
 
 ' Why should she want to provoke him % ' 
 
 'Ah, why? That is the mystery. You know her better than 
 I do, and must be better able to understand her motives.' 
 
 ' But I don't understand her in the least,' protested Mrs. 
 Torf ington. ' She is quite a different person this year from the 
 woman I knew last year. I thought her the most devoted wife 
 and mother. The house was not half so nice to stay at ; but it 
 was ever so much more respectable. I had arranged with my 
 next people — Lodway Court, near Bristol — to be with them at 
 the end of the week ; but I suppose the best thing we can all do 
 is to go at once. There is an air of general break-up in Mr. 
 Tregonell's hasty arrangements for an Indian tour.' 
 
 ' Bather like the supper- party in Macbeth, is it not ? ' said 
 FitzJesse, ' except that her ladyship is not to the fore.' 
 
 ' I call it altogether uncomfortable,' exclaimed Mrs. Torring- 
 ton, pettishly. "How do I know that the Lodway Court people 
 will be able to receive me. I may be obliged to go to an hotel.' 
 
 ' Heaven avert such a catastrophe.' 
 
 ' It would be very inconvenient — with a maid, and no end of 
 luggage. One is not prepared for that kind of thing when one 
 starts on a. round of visits.' 
 
 For l)opsy and Mopsy there was no such agreeable prospect 
 as a change of scene from one ' well-found ' country-house to 
 another. To be tumbled out of this lap of luxury meant a fall 
 into the dreariness of South Belgravia and the King's Boad — 
 long, monotonous, arid streets, with all the dust that had been 
 gixmnd under the feet of happy people in the London season 
 blown about in dense clouds, for the discomforture of the out- 
 casts who must stay in town when the season is over ; sparse 
 dinners, coals measured by the scuttle, smoky fires, worn 
 carpets, flat beer, and the whole gamut of existence equally flat, 
 stale and unprofitable. 
 
 Dopsy and Mopsy listened with doleful countenances to 
 Jack's talk about the big things he and his friend were going to 
 do in Bengal, the tigers, the wild pigs, and wild peacocks they 
 were going to slay. Why had not Destiny made them young 
 men, that they too might prey upon their species, and enjoy life 
 at somebody else's expense ?
 
 We have done with Tears and, Treasons. 349 
 
 1 I'll tell you what,' said their brother, in the most cheerful 
 manner. 'Of course you won't be staying here after I leave. 
 Mrs. Tregonell will want to be alone when her husband goes. 
 You had better go with the Squire and me as far as Southamp- 
 ton. He'll frank you. We can all stop at the " Duke uf 
 Cornwall" to-morrow night, and start for Southampton by an 
 early train next morning. You can lunch with us at the 
 " Dolphin," see us off by steamer, and go on to London afterwards.' 
 
 ' That will be a ray of jollity to gild the last hour of our 
 happiness,' said Mopsy. 'Oh how I loathe the idea of going 
 back to those lodgings — and pa ! ' 
 
 ' The governor is a trial, I must admit,' said Jack. ' But 
 you see the European idea is that an ancient parent can't hang 
 on hand too long. There's no wheeling him down to the Ganges, 
 and leaving him to settle his account with the birds and .the 
 fishes ; and even in India that kind of thing is getting out of date.' 
 
 ' I wouldn't so much mind him,' said Dopsy, plaintively, 
 ' if his habits were more human ; but there are so many trails 
 in his character — especially his winter cough — which remind 
 one of the lower animals.' 
 
 ' Poor old Pater,' sighed Jack, with a touch of feeling. 
 He was not often at home. ' Would you believe it, that he 
 was once almost a gentleman 1 Yes, I remember, an early 
 period in my life when I was not ashamed to own him. But 
 when a fellow has been travelling steadily down hill for 
 fifteen years, his ultimate level must be uncommonly low.' 
 
 ' True,' sighed Mopsy, ' we have always tried to rise superior 
 to our surroundings ; but it has been a terrible struggle.' 
 
 "There have been summer evenings, when that wretched 
 slavey has been out with her young man, that I have been sorely 
 tempted to fetch the beer with my own hands — there is a jug 
 and bottle entrance at the place where we deal — but I have 
 suffered agonies of thirst rather than so lower myself,' said Dopsy, 
 with the complacence of conscious heroism. 
 
 ' Right you are,' said Jack, who would sooner have fetched 
 beer in the very eye of society than gone without it ; ' one must 
 draw the line somewhere.' 
 
 ' And to go from a paradise likethistosuchadenasthat,' exclaim- 
 ed Dopsy, still harping on the unloveliness of the Pimlico lodging. 
 
 ' Cheer up, old girl. I daresay Mrs. T. will ask you again. 
 She's very good-natured.' 
 
 ' She has behaved like an angel to us,' answered Dopsy, ' but 
 I can't make her out. There's a mystery somewhere.' 
 
 ' There's always a skeleton in the cupboard. Don't you try 
 to haul old Bony out,' said the philosophical Captain. 
 
 This was after luncheon, when Jack and his sisters had th« 
 billiard-room to themselves. Mr. Tregonell was in his study, 
 making things straight with his bailiff, coachman, butler, in his 
 usual business-like and decisive manner. Mr. FitzJesee was
 
 350 Mount Boyal. 
 
 packing his portmanteau, meaning to sleep that night at Pen- 
 zance, lie was quite shrewd enough to be conscious of the 
 tempest in the air, and was not disposed to inflict himself upon 
 his friends in the hour of trouble, or to be bored by having to 
 Km I utilize with them in their affliction. 
 
 lie had studied Mrs. Tregonell closely, and he had made up 
 his mind that conduct which was out of harmony with her 
 character must needs be inspired by some powerful motive. He 
 had heard the account of her first engagement — knew all about 
 little Fishky — and he had been told the parti cnlars of her first 
 lover's death. It was not difficult for so astute an observer of 
 human nature to make out the rest of the story. 
 
 Little Monty had been invited to go as far as Southampton 
 with the travellers. The St. Aubyns declared that home-duties 
 had long been demanding their attention, and that they must 
 positively leave next day. 
 
 Mr. Faddie accepted an invitation to accompany them, and 
 
 spend a week at their fine old place on the other side of the 
 
 county — thus, without any trouble on Christabel's part, her house 
 
 was cleared for her. "When she came down to luncheon next 
 
 day, two or three hours after the departure of Leonard and his 
 
 party, who were to spend that night at Plymouth, with some idea 
 
 of an evening at the theatre on the part of Mop and Dop, she 
 
 had only the St. Aubyns and Mr. Faddie to entertain. Even 
 
 they were on the wing, as the carriage which was to convey them to 
 
 Bodmin Road Station was ordered for threeo'clock in the afternoon. 
 
 Christabel's pale calm face showed no sign of the mental strain 
 
 of the last twenty-four hours. There was such a relief in having 
 
 done with the false life which she had been leading in the past 
 
 month ; such an infinite comfort in being able to fall back on her 
 
 old self ; such an unspeakable relief, too, in the sense of having 
 
 Baved herself on the very brink of the biack gulf of sin, that it 
 
 was almost as if peace and gladness had returned to her soul. 
 
 Once again she had sought for comfort at the one Divine source 
 
 of consolation ; once more she had dared to pray ; and this 
 
 tardy resumption of the old sweet habit of girlhood seemed like 
 
 a return to some dear home from which she has been long 
 
 banished. Even those who knew so little of her real character 
 
 were able to see the change in her countenance. 
 
 ' What a lovely expression Mrs. Tregonell has to-day ! ' mur- 
 mured Mr. Faddie to his neighbour, Mrs. St. Aubyn, tenderly 
 replenishing her hock glass, as a polite preliminary to filling his 
 own. ' So soft ; so Madonna-like ! ' 
 
 ' I suppose she is rather sorry for having driven away her 
 husband,' said Mrs. St. Aubyn, severely. ' That has sobered her.' 
 ' There are depths in the human soul which only the con- 
 fessor can sound,' answered Mr. Faddie, who would not be 
 betrayed into saying anything uncivil about his hostess,
 
 We have Jone with Tears and Treasons. 351 
 
 1 "Would that she mi.vhi be led to pour her griefs into an car 
 attuned to every note i:; the diapason of sorrow.' 
 
 ' I don't approve of confession, and I never shall bring myself 
 to like it,' said Mrs. St. Aubyn, sturdily. ' It is un-English ! ' 
 ' But your Rubric, dear lady. Surely you stand by your Rubric?' 
 ' If you mean the email print paragraphs in my prayer book, I 
 never read 'em, ! answered the Squire's wife, bluntly. 'I hope I know 
 my way through the Church Service without any help of t hat kind. 
 Mr. Faddie sighed •»* this Boeotian ignorance, and went on 
 with his luncheon. It might be long before he partook of so 
 gracious a meal. A woman whose Church views were so barbar- 
 ous as those of Mrs. St. Aubyn, might keep a table of primitive 
 coarseness. A Squire "Westernish kind of fare might await him 
 in the St. Aubyn mansion. 
 
 An hour later, he pressed Christabel's hand tenderly as he 
 bade her good-bye. 'A thousand thanks for your sweet hospi- 
 tality, 1 he murmured , gently. 'This visit has been most precious 
 to me. It has been a privilege to be brought nearer the lives of 
 those blessed martyrs, Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus ; toi'enew 
 my acquaintance with dear Saint Mertheriana, whose life I only 
 dimly remembered ; to kneel at the rustic shrines of Saint 
 Ulette and Saint Piran. It has been a period of mental growth, 
 the memory of which I shall ever value.' 
 
 And then, with a grave uplifting of two fingers, and a bless- 
 ing on the house, Mr. Faddie went off to his place beside Clara 
 St. Aubyn, on the back seat of the landau which was to convey 
 the departing guests to the Bodmin Road Station, a two hours' 
 drive through the brisk autumn air. 
 
 And thus, like the shadowy figures in a dissolving view, 
 Christabel's guests melted away, and she and Jessie Bridgeman 
 stood alone in the grand old hall which had been of late so 
 perverted from its old sober air and quiet domestic uses. Her 
 first act as the carriage drove away was to fling one of the case- 
 ments wide open. 
 
 ' Open the other windows, Jessie,' she said, impetuously ; ' all 
 of them.' 
 
 ' Do you know that the wind is in the east ? ' 
 'I know that it is pure and sweet, the breath of heaven blow- 
 ing over hill and sea, and that it is sweeping away the tainted 
 atmosphere of the last month, the poison of scandal, and slang, 
 and cigarettes, and billiard-marker talk, and all that is most un- 
 lovely in life. Oh, Jessie, thank God you and I are alone together, 
 and the play is played out.' 
 
 1 Did you see your husband to-day before he left? ' 
 'No Why should we meet anymore? What can we two 
 have to tay to each other?' 
 
 ' Th< n he kft his home without a word frcru you,' said Jessie, 
 with a shade of wonder.
 
 552 Mount Royal. 
 
 ' His home,' repeated Christabel ; ' the Lome in which his pool 
 mother thought it would be my lot to make his life good and 
 happy. If she could know— hut no— thank God the dead are at 
 peace. No, Jessie, he did not go without one word from me. I 
 wrote a few lines of farewell. I told him I had prayed to my 
 God for power to pity and forgive him, and that pity and pardon 
 had come to me. I implored him to mal- his future life one 
 long atonement for that fatal act last year. I who had sinned 
 so deeply had no right to take a high tone. I spoke to him as a 
 sinner to a sinner.' 
 
 ' I hope lie does repent — that he will atone,' said Miss Bridge- 
 man, gloomily. _ ' His life is in his own keeping. Thank God that 
 you and I are rid of him, and can live the rest of our days in peace. 
 
 Very quietly flows the stream of life at Mount Eoyal now that 
 these feverish scenes have passed into the shadow of the days 
 that are no more. Christabel devotes herself to the rearing of 
 her boy, lives for him, thinks for him, finds joy in his boyish 
 pleasures, grieves for his boyish griefs, teaches him, walks with 
 him, rides with him, watches and nurses him in every childish 
 illness, and wonders that her life is so full of peace and sunshine. 
 The memory of a sorrowful past can never cease to be a part of 
 her life. All those scenes she loves best in this world, the familiar 
 places amidst which her quiet days are spent, are haunted by one 
 mournful shadow ; but she loves the hills and sea-shore only 
 the dearer for that spiritual presence, which follows her in 
 the noontide and the gloaming, for ever reminding her, amidst 
 the simple joys of the life she knows, of that unknown life 
 where the veil shall be lifted, and the lost shall be found. 
 
 Major Bree is her devoted friend and adviser, idolizes the 
 boy, and just manages to prevent his manliness deteriorating 
 under the pressure of womanly indulgence and womanly fears. 
 Jessie has refused that faithful admirer a second time, but 
 Christabel has an idea that he means to tempt his fate again, 
 and in the end must prevail, by sheer force of goodness and fidelity. 
 
 Kneeling by Angus Hamleigh's grave, little Leo hears froin 
 his mother's lips how the dead man loved him, and be- 
 queathed his fortune to him. The mother endeavours to 
 explain in simplest, clearest words how the wealth so entrusted 
 to him should be a sacred charge, never to be turned to evil 
 uses or squandered in self-indulgence.' 
 
 ' You will try to do good when you are a man won't you, 
 Leo ? ' she asks smiling down at the bright young face, which 
 shines like a sunbeam inits childish gladness. 
 
 'Ye3,' he answers, confidently. 'I'll give Uncle Jakes tobacco .' 
 
 This is his widest idea of benevolence at the present stage ©f 
 development. 
 
 WILLIAM RIDER AND SON, PRINTERS, LONDON.
 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A.