"Very fond of some children," he answered gravely. "I shall be very fond of this boy, if he will let me."
"Leo is such a darling--and he takes to you already," said Mopsy, seeing that the child graciously accepted Mr. Hamleigh"s attentions, and even murmured an approving "gur"--followed by a simple one-part melody of gurgling noises--but whether in approval of the gentlemen himself or of his watch-chain, about which the pink flexible fingers had wound themselves, was an open question.
This was in the hall after breakfast, on a bright sunshiny morning--doors and windows open, and the gardens outside all abloom with chrysanthemums and scarlet geraniums; the gentlemen of the party standing about with their guns ready to start. Mopsy and Dopsy were dressed in home-made gowns of dark brown serge which simulated the masculine simplicity of tailor-made garments. They wore coquettish little toques of the same dark brown stuff, also home-made--and surely, if a virtuous man contending with calamity is a spectacle meet for the G.o.ds to admire a needy young woman making her own raiment is at least worthy of human approval.
"You are coming with us, aren"t you, Hamleigh," asked Leonard, seeing Angus still occupied with the child.
"No, thanks; I don"t feel in good form for woodc.o.c.k shooting. My cough was rather troublesome last night."
Mopsy and Dopsy looked at each other despairingly. Here was a golden opportunity lost. If it were only possible to sprain an ankle on the instant.
Jack Vandeleur was a good brother--so long as fraternal kindness did not cost money--and he saw that look of blank despair in poor Dopsy"s eyes and lips.
"I think Mr. Hamleigh is wise," he said. "This bright morning will end in broken weather. Hadn"t you two girls better stay at home? The rain will spoil your gowns."
"Our gowns won"t hurt," said Mopsy brightening. "But do you really think there will be rain? We had so set our hearts on going with you; but it is rather miserable to be out on those hills in a blinding rain.
One might walk over the edge of a cliff."
"Keep on the safe side and stay at home," said Leonard, with that air of rough good nature which is such an excellent excuse for bad manners.
"Come Ponto, come Juno, hi Delia," this to the lovely lemon and white spaniels, fawning upon him with mute affection.
"I think we may as well give it up," said Dopsy, "we shall be a nuisance to the shooters if it rains."
So they stayed, and beguiled Mr. Hamleigh to the billiard room, where they both played against him, and were beaten--after which Mopsy entreated him to give her a lesson in the art, declaring that he played divinely--in such a quite style--so very superior to Jack"s or Mr.
Tregonell"s, though both those gentlemen were good players. Angus consented, kindly enough, and gave both ladies the most careful instruction in the art of making pockets and cannons; but he was wondering all the while how Christabel was spending her morning, and thinking how sweet it would have been to have strolled with her across the hills to the quiet little church in the dingle where he had once dreamed they two might be married.
"I was a fool to submit to delay," he thought, remembering all the pain and madness of the past. "If I had insisted on being married here--and at once--how happy--oh G.o.d!--how happy we might have been. Well, it matters little, now that the road is so near the end. I suppose the dismal close would have come just as soon if my way of life had been strewed with flowers."
It was luncheon-time before the Miss Vandeleurs consented to release him. Once having got him in their clutch he was as firmly held as if he had been caught by an octopus. Christabel wondered a little that Angus Hamleigh should find amus.e.m.e.nt for his morning in the billiard room, and in such society.
"Perhaps, after all, the Miss Vandeleurs are the kind of girls whom all gentlemen admire," she said to Jessie. "I know I thought it odd that Leonard should admire them; but you see Mr. Hamleigh is equally pleased with them."
"Mr. Hamleigh is nothing of the kind," answered Jessie in her usual decided way. "But Dop is setting her cap at him in a positively disgraceful manner--even for Dop."
"Pray don"t call her by that horrid name."
"Why not; it is what her brother and sister call her, and it expresses her so exactly."
Mr. Hamleigh and the two damsels now appeared, summoned by the gong, and they all went into the dining-room. It was quite a merry luncheon party.
Care seemed to have no part in that cheery circle. Angus had made up his mind to be happy, and Christabel was as much at ease with him as she had been in those innocent, unconscious days when he first came to Mount Royal. Dopsy was in high spirits, thinking that she was fast advancing towards victory. Mr. Hamleigh had been so kind, so attentive, had done exactly what she had asked him to do, and how could she doubt that he had consulted his own pleasure in so doing. Poor Dopsy was accustomed to be treated with scant ceremony by her brother"s acquaintance, and it did not enter into her mind that a man might be bored by her society, and not betray his weariness.
After luncheon Jessie, who was always energetic, suggested a walk.
The threatened bad weather had not come: it was a greyish afternoon, sunless but mild.
"If we walk towards St. Nectan"s Kieve, we may meet the shooters," said Christabel. "That is a great place for woodc.o.c.k."
"That will be delicious!" exclaimed Dopsy. "I worship St. Nectan"s Kieve. Such a lovely ferny, rocky, wild, watery spot." And away she and her sister skipped, to put on the brown toques, and to refresh themselves with a powder puff.
They started for their ramble with Randie, and a favourite Clumber spaniel, degraded from his proud position as a sporting dog, to the ign.o.ble luxury of a house pet, on account of an incorrigible desultoriness in his conduct with birds.
These affectionate creatures frisked round Christabel, while Miss Vandeleur and her sister seemed almost as friskily to surround Mr.
Hamleigh with their South Belgravian blandishments.
"You look as if you were not very strong," hazarded Dopsy, sympathetically. "Are you not afraid of a long walk?"
"Not at all; I never feel better than when walking on these hills,"
answered Angus. "It is almost my native air, you see. I came here to get a stock of rude health before I go to winter in the South."
"And you are really going to be abroad all the winter?" sighed Dopsy, as if she would have said, "How shall I bear my life in your absence."
"Yes, it is five years since I spent a winter in England. I hold my life on that condition. I am never to know the luxury of a London fog, or see a Drury Lane pantomime, or skate upon the Serpentine. A case of real distress, is it not?"
"Very sad--for your friends," said Dopsy; "but I can quite imagine that you love the sunny South. How I long to see the Mediterranean--the mountains--the pine-trees--the border-land of Italy."
"No doubt you will go there some day--and be disappointed. People generally are when they indulge in day-dreams about a place."
"My dreams will always be dreams," answered Dopsy, with a profound sigh: "we are not rich enough to travel."
Christabel walked on in front with Jessie and the dogs. Mr. Hamleigh was longing to be by her side--to talk as they had talked of old--of a thousand things which could be safely discussed without any personal feeling. They had so many sympathies, so many ideas in common. All the world of sense and sentiment was theirs wherein to range at will. But Dopsy and Mopsy stuck to him like burs; plying him with idle questions, and stereotyped remarks, looking at him with languishing eyes.
He was too much a gentleman, had too much good feeling to be rude to them--but he was bored excessively.
They went by the cliffs--a wild grand walk. The wide Atlantic spread its dull leaden-coloured waves before them under the grey sky--touched with none of those translucent azures and carmines which so often beautify that western sea. They crossed a bit of hillocky common, and then went down to look at a slate quarry under the cliff--a scene of uncanny grandeur--grey and wild and desolate.
Dopsy and Mopsy gushed and laughed and declared it was just the scene for a murder, or a duel, or something dreadful and dramatic. The dogs ran into all manner of perilous places, and had to be called away from the verge of instant death.
"Are you fond of aristocratic society. Miss Vandeleur?" asked Angus.
Mopsy pleaded guilty to a prejudice in favour of the Upper Ten.
"Then allow me to tell you that you were never in the company of so many d.u.c.h.esses and countesses in your life as you are at this moment."
Mopsy looked mystified, until Miss Bridgeman explained that these were the names given to slates of particular sizes, great stacks of which stood on either side of them ready for shipment.
"How absurd," exclaimed Mopsy.
"Everything must have a name, even the slate that roofs your scullery."
From the quarry they strolled across the fields to the high road, and the gate of the farm which contains within its boundary the wonderful waterfall called St. Nectan"s Kieve.
They met the sportsmen coming out of the hollow with well-filled game-bags.
Leonard was in high spirits.
"So you"ve all come to meet us," he said, looking at his wife, and from his wife to Angus Hamleigh, with a keen, quick glance, too swift to be remarkable. "Uncommonly good of you. We are going to have a grand year for woodc.o.c.k, I believe--like the season of 1855, when a farmer at St.
Buryan shot fifty-four in one week."
"Poor dear little birds!" sighed Mopsy; "I feel so sorry for them."