Mount Royal.
Volume 1.
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
CHAPTER I.
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 could 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 infatuated 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 falling 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, and 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 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 Clara and I said it was his kind heart that made him so quick at understanding how to help the poor without humiliating them."
"It was very nice of him," said Christabel, 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 Christabel, 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 Hamleigh; 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 Christmas that we were engaged," continued Mrs.
Tregonell, looking dreamily at the fire. "My father 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 till late in the autumn, when it would be three years since his wife"s death. It was my father"s wish that I should not be married 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 us--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 early in May, when he and Clara and I were caught in a drenching 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 be, 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 hour my happiness was gone. My life was one perpetual dread--one ceaseless struggle 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 wonderfully 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 me, I began to hope! but early in September, while the dressmakers were in the house making my wedding clothes, the end came suddenly, unexpectedly, with only a few hours" warning. Oh, Christabel! I cannot speak of that day!"
"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 Hamleigh," said the sensible voice out of the shadow. "Isn"t that just a little inconsistent of our sweet Belle?"
"Don"t call me your "sweet Belle"--as if I were a baby," exclaimed 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-morrow."
"I have not seen him since he was at Eton. The Squire drove me down on a Fourth of June to see him."
"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 bl.u.s.tered 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 boy in those days?" asked Christabel, keenly interested.
"He was a handsome gentlemanlike 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?"
"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 vermilion--like--like the general run of young men," said Christabel, reddening, and hurrying on confusedly; "and he was altogether rather a superior person at the university."
"He had not your cousin Leonard"s high spirits and powerful physique,"
said Mrs. Tregonell, as if she were ever so slightly offended. "Young men"s tastes are so different."
"Yes," sighed Christabel, "it"s lucky they are, is it not? It wouldn"t do for them _all_ to keep rats in their rooms, would it? 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 armchair on the other side of the fireplace.
"Why not, Mistress Oracle?" 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 am 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 house."
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 antecedents. 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 filled 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 bosky hill about a mile and a half from the little town of Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall. It was an easy matter, according to the Heralds" Office, to show that Mount Royal had belonged to the Tregonells in the days of the Norman kings; for the Tregonells traced their descent, by a female branch, from the ancient baronial family of Botterell or Bottreaux, who once held a kind of Court in their castle on Mount Royal, had their dungeons and their prisoners, and, in the words of Carew, "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 s.p.a.cious 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 hyperbole perhaps to call those Cornish hills mountains, yet a.s.suredly it was a mountain landscape over which the eye roved as it looked from the windows of Mount Royal; for those wide sweeps of hill side, those deep clefts and gorges, and heathery slopes, on which the dark red cattle grazed in silent peacefulness, and 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 Switzerland. And away to the right, beyond the wild and indented coast-line, that horned coast which is said to have given its name to Cornwall--Cornu-Wales--stretched the Atlantic.
The room had that quaint charm peculiar to rooms occupied by many generations, and upon 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 _prie-dieu_, with claw feet, recalled the earlier beauties of the Stuart Court. 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 j.a.panese bowls, seen dimly in the fitful fire-glow, made patches of light and colour.
The girl kneeling by the matron"s chair, looking 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-rose 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 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 G.o.d, 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.