LE SECRET DE POLICHINELLE.
The 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 flowers--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 FitzPelham
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--generally 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," said a
ponderous middle-aged matron to Miss Courtenay. "I can't breathe any
where 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 Ramsgate 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
Ramsgate; 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 too lovely," said the
matron, who would have despised herself had she been familiar with her
native land. "But what have you done with Mr. Hamleigh? I am quite
disappointed at not seeing him this afternoon."
"He is in Scotland," said Christabel, and then went on to tell as much
as was necessary about her lover's journey to the North.
"How dreadfully dull you must be without him!" said the lady,
sympathetically, and several other ladies--notably a baronet's 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 giving a better dinner, on a small scale, than any other
lonely woman in London. 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, circulating 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, which,
on a somewhat modified form, resembled Lord Thurlow's, but said nothing.
The Somerset House young man stole a glance at FitzPelham, and smiled
meaningly; but the amiable FitzPelham was only vacuous.
"Of course you have seen this play," said Mrs. Tregonell, turning to
Lady Cumberbridge. "You see everything, I know?"
"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 immense 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 fortune to the
management, is just one of the things that I don't care to talk about
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.
"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 not see anything
objectionable."
"You must be very blind, as well as dense, if you didn't see 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's aunt, to whom the girl's welfare and happiness were vital,
knew nothing.
She determined to take the most immediate and direct way of knowing all
that was to be known, by questioning that peripatetic chronicle 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 Cumberbridge, 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.
"You 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 see 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 opportunity 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! And do you really mean
to tell me that you don't know?"
"That I don't know what?"
"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, 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 name to you. I dare say you will
hate me if I tell you the truth: people always do; because, in point of
fact, truth is generally hateful. We can't afford to live up to it."
"I shall be 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 Christabel 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? 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 Drury 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 like a poet, and who yet had given
his first passionate love, and the best and brightest years of his life
to a stage-dancer.
"How long is it since Mr. Hamleigh has ceased to be devoted to Miss
Mayne?" 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 young sprig of
fashion, a general favourite, whose infatuation for a well-known actress
has been a matter of regret among the _haute volée_, 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
any more 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 she 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 infatuation, and there were
plenty of men in his own set to encourage him. Modern society has
adopted Danton's motto, don't you know?--_de l'audace, encore de
l'audace et toujours de l'audace!_ 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? This horrid story was true, no doubt. Major 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? Allow the engagement to go on?--allow an
innocent and pure-minded girl to marry a man whose infatuation for an
actress had been town talk; who had come to Mount Royal fresh from that
evil 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 charms 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
purity 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, Aunt 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 armchair.
"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, calmly. He knew
perfectly what was coming, and that he should require all his
patience--all that sweetness of temper which had been his 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 him Lady Cumberbridge's story.
"Did you, or did you not, know this last October?" 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?"
"Certainly not. I told you at the time, when I came back from town, that
your young protégé's life had been a trifle wild. Miss Bridgeman
remembered the fact, and spoke of it the night Hamleigh 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 finally. 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 her--associate his name with hers
irrevocably--for you know that the world never forgets these
alliances--and then to come to Mount Royal, and practise upon our
provincial ignorance, and offer his battered life to my niece! Was that
well?"
"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 youthful 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?
You can't 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."
"You don't mean that you will tell her this story?"
"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 mercy's sake, be reasonable in this matter! I am talking to you as
if I were Christabel's 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, girls," said Major Bree, as the mournful meal
languished towards its melancholy close, "we seem all very doleful
without Hamleigh. 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?"
"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 drawing-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 armchair--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 discovery 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 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 clock chimed the half-hour after ten the
Major got up and took his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he
pressed her hand at parting to murmur: "Remember," with an accent as
solemn as Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon.
Mrs. Tregonell answered never a word. She had been pondering 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.
"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. Dormer was never seen
without her needlework. She complained that there was so little to do
for Mrs. Tregonell that unless she had plenty of plain sewing she must
expire for want of 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 brows bent. She
felt herself taken by storm, as it were, surprised into decision before
she had time to make up her mind.
"Since you know so much, perhaps you had better know all," she said,
gloomily; and then she told the story, shaping it as 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 sweet 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 idolater 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 dimness of the past, and stood up in her mind as if they had been
living creatures. He had compared himself to Tristan--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 him happy.
Nay, he had rather forced from her the confession of her love by his
piteous representation 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 to me?" said Mrs. Tregonell, tenderly,
with her arm round the girl's neck, her face leaning down to touch that
drooping head.
"What can I 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 could he after
having only just left off loving this other woman?--if he had left off
loving her. And how could he when she is so perfectly lovely? Why should
he have ever ceased to care for her? 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?"
"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 of 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? 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?"
"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 her life. "It is so
difficult at my age to know what one would have done in one's girlhood.
The fires 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
been notoriously devoted to another woman--that woman still living,
still having power to charm him. How can you ever be secure of his love?
how be sure that he would not be lured back to the old madness? These
women are so full of craft--it is their profession to tempt men to
destruction. You remember what the Bible says of such? '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? 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 would have been consumed with jealous fears--suspicion
would have haunted your life--that evil woman's 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's forehead, with
tremulous lips.
"Won't you stay, dear? Sleep with me to-night."
"Sleep?" echoed the girl. "No, Auntie dear; I would rather be 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, clouded with creamy Indian
muslin, a bower-like room, with flowers and books, and a miniature piano
in a convenient recess by the fireplace. 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 voluminous 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 compared 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, Sevigné, 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 their lives were spent for the most part together.
Notes containing suggestions for some new 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 talk 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 task was done.
Faint gleams of morning stole through the striped blinds, as she sealed
the packet in which she had folded that lengthy history of Angus
Hamleigh's courtship--a large square 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 flooded 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 cancelment
of her engagement, with the least possible pain for the man she loved,
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?" 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 chain than Aphrodite's rosy
garlands. Perhaps, if Miss Courtenay had 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 to acknowledge 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 had hardly tried to hide from him, when once he had
told her of his early doom. 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
story 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.
Christabel 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 that there was something sorely amiss--but
waiting to be told what this sudden cloud of sorrow meant.
Christabel went back to her own room directly after breakfast. Her aunt
forbore any attempt at consolation, knowing it was best to let the girl
bear her grief in her own way.
"You will go with me for a drive after luncheon, dear?" she asked.
"Yes, Auntie--but I would rather we went a little way in the country, 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 straining
one's every nerve to see the Princess drive by--only to discover the
humiliating fact that she is one of the very few respectable-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?"
mused Jessie, as she went up to her own snug little den on the third
floor. "Better not, perhaps. I like to hug my sorrows. 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?" 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?" asked Christabel, carelessly.
Her aunt looked at her with intense surprise,--how could she pronounce
_that_ name, and to ask a frivolous question?
"Yes; she has a lovely house called the Rosary. Mr. FitzPelham 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 Road. 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. Dormer brought a little note for her
mistress.
"Miss Courtenay gave me this just before she went out, ma'am."
"Out! Has Miss Courtenay gone out?"
"Yes, ma'am; Daniel got her a cab five minutes ago."
"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 which 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."