MOUNT ROYAL
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET" ETC. ETC. ETC.
In Three Volumes
VOL. I.
LONDON
JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL
MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
1882
[_All rights reserved_]
Ballantyne Press
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO., EDINBURGH
CHANDOS STREET, LONDON
CONTENTS TO VOL. I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE 1
II. BUT THEN CAME ONE, THE LOVELACE OF HIS DAY 35
III. "TINTAGEL, HALF IN SEA, AND HALF ON LAND" 71
IV. "LOVE! THOU ART LEADING ME FROM WINTRY COLD" 103
V. "THE SILVER ANSWER RANG,--'NOT DEATH, BUT LOVE'" 128
VI. IN SOCIETY 144
VII. CUPID AND PSYCHE 199
VIII. LE SECRET DE POLICHINELLE 228
IX. "LOVE IS LOVE FOR EVERMORE" 275
MOUNT ROYAL.
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 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 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 _blasé_ 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 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 hyperbole 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 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
Japanese 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 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 Ralph Champernowne, 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 wanted, and never experienced the pain of seeing
poverty which she could not relieve in some measure from her
well-supplied purse. The general opinion in the neighbourhood of Mount
Royal 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 Pagoda
tree, and the supposed inability of any Indian official to refuse a
bribe, than on plain facts or personal knowledge.
Mrs. Tregonell had been left a widow at thirty-five 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 remorseful 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 followers and flatterers. His University career had been
altogether a failure and a disgrace. He had taken no degree--had made
himself notorious for those rough pranks which have not even the merit
of being original--the traditionary college misdemeanours handed down
from generation to generation of undergraduates, and which by their
blatant folly incline the outside world to vote for the suppression of
Universities and the extinction 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, generally 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 announced 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 agricultural 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 son; and there was no sacrifice, 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? but never without the parental blessing. That
would be his to the end. He could not sin beyond her large capacity for
pardon: he could not exhaust an inexhaustible love. So Leonard, who had
suddenly found that wild Cornish coast, 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 recommended the
rough-and-tumble life of a sailing-vessel; but Leonard preferred 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.
Tregonell 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, Christabel
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 servants' 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 euphemism for such a temper; and, as years
went on, Mr. Tregonell's visits to the kitchen and servants' hall came
to be less appreciated by his retainers. He no longer went there to be
petted--to run riot in boyish liveliness, upsetting the housemaids'
work-boxes, or making toffy under 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 flags 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 stable-boys liked him; for with them he was always
familiar, 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-fashioned 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 Plymouth, 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 labour, 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
Christabel 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 was much older, in order that her niece might be duly
presented at Court, and qualified for that place in society which a
young lady of good family and ample means might fairly be entitled to
hold.
Christabel 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 amidst 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 accordance 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, because 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 known 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?" she said, speculatively, to Jessie
Bridgeman, Mrs. Tregonell's housekeeper, companion, and factotum, 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 entrusted 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 furze-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?" repeated Christabel, digging the
point of her walking-stick into a ferny hillock on the topmost edge of a
deep cleft in the hills, on which commanding spot she had just taken her
stand, after bounding up the narrow path 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
precipitous slopes; "wouldn't it be too dreadful, Jessie?"
"It would be inconvenient," answered Miss Bridgeman, coolly, resting
both hands on the horny crook of her sturdy umbrella, and gazing
placidly seaward; "but we could cut him."
"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, doggedly.
"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 volunteer 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 Courtenay six years, dependent upon their
liking or caprice for all the comforts 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 part 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 his 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, describing a
circle which included the gold and bronze hills, the shadowy gorges, the
bold headlands curving away to Hartland on one side, to Tintagel on the
other--Lundy Island a dim line of dun colour on the horizon.
"No 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 these 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 with us? I
am sure there are books enough at Mount Royal. He need not expire for
want of something to read."
"Do you suppose that books--the best and noblest 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-a-days, 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 companion," said
Christabel.
"Hardly, for he must be brim full of facts."
"I abhor facts. Well, if Mr. Hamleigh is that kind of person, 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 village street.
Jessie had a message to carry to one of Mrs. Tregonell's 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 loose 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 saying that I hated my cousin Leonard. I
hope Mr. Hamleigh will 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 supercilious, 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 is to
us."
Somehow the idea of Leonard's excellent heart and affectionate
disposition was not altogether a pleasant one. Christabel shuddered 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 that unknown quantity, Angus Hamleigh.
"I am an idiot to be making fancy pictures of him, when at seven o'clock
this evening I shall know all about him for good or evil," she said
aloud, as Jessie came out of the cottage, which nestled low down in its
little garden, with a slate for a doorstep, 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," I 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 very dear to her.