MOUNT ROYAL
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET" ETC. ETC. ETC.
In Three Volumes
VOL. II.
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. II.
CHAP. PAGE
I. "LET ME AND MY PASSIONATE LOVE GO BY" 1
II. "ALAS FOR ME THEN, MY GOOD DAYS ARE DONE" 16
III. "GRIEF A FIXED STAR, AND JOY A VANE THAT VEERS" 25
IV. "LOVE WILL HAVE HIS DAY" 49
V. "BUT HERE IS ONE WHO LOVES YOU AS OF OLD" 87
VI. "THAT LIP AND VOICE ARE MUTE FOR EVER" 115
VII. "NOT THE GODS CAN SHAKE THE PAST" 131
VIII. "I HAVE PUT MY DAYS AND DREAMS OUT OF MIND" 149
IX. "AND PALE FROM THE PAST WE DRAW NIGH THEE" 164
X. "BUT IT SUFFICETH, THAT THE DAY WILL END" 203
XI. "WHO KNOWS NOT CIRCE?" 241
XII. "AND TIME IS SETTING WI' ME, O" 276
MOUNT ROYAL.
CHAPTER I.
"LET ME AND MY PASSIONATE LOVE GO BY."
That second week of July was not altogether peerless weather. It
contained within the brief span of its seven days one of those sudden
and withering changes which try humanity more than the hardest winter,
with which ever Transatlantic weather-prophet threatened our island. The
sultry heat of a tropical Tuesday was followed by the blighting east
wind of a chilly Wednesday; and in the teeth of that keen east wind,
blowing across the German Ocean, and gathering force among the
Pentlands, Angus Hamleigh set forth from the cosy shelter of Hillside,
upon a long day's salmon fishing.
His old kinswoman's health had considerably improved since his arrival;
but she was not yet so entirely restored to her normal condition as to
be willing that he should go back to London. She pleaded with him for a
few days more, and in order that the days should not hang heavily on his
hands, she urged him to make the most of his Scottish holiday by
enjoying a day or two's salmon fishing. The first floods, which did not
usually begin till August, had already swollen the river, and the grilse
and early autumn salmon were running up; according to Donald, the handy
man who helped in the gardens, and who was a first-rate fisherman.
"There's all your ain tackle upstairs in one o' the presses," said the
old lady; "ye'll just find it ready to your hand."
The offer was tempting--Angus had found the long summer days pass but
slowly in house and garden--albeit there was a library of good old
classics. He so longed to be hastening back to Christabel--found the
hours so empty and joyless without her. He was an ardent
fisherman--loving that leisurely face-to-face contemplation of Nature
which goes with rod and line. The huntsman sees the landscape flash past
him like a dream of grey wintry beauty--it is no more to him than a
picture in a gallery--he has rarely time to feel Nature's tranquil
charms. Even when he must needs stand still for a while, he is devoured
by impatience to be scampering off again, and to see the world in
motion. But the angler has leisure to steep himself in the atmosphere of
hill and streamlet--to take Nature's colours into his soul. Every angler
ought to blossom into a landscape painter. But this salmon fishing was
not altogether a dreamy and contemplative business. Quickness, presence
of mind, and energetic action were needed at some stages of the sport.
The moment came when Angus found his rod bending under the weight of a
magnificent salmon, and when it seemed a toss up between landing his
fish and being dragged under water by him.
"Jump in," cried Donald, excitedly, when the angler's line was nearly
expended, "it's only up to your neck." So Angus jumped in, and followed
the lightning-swift rush of the salmon down stream, and then, turning
him after some difficulty, had to follow his prey up stream again, back
to the original pool, where he captured him, and broke the top of his
eighteen-foot rod.
Angus clad himself thinly, because the almanack told him it was
summer--he walked far and fast--overheated himself--waded for hours
knee-deep in the river--his fishing-boots of three seasons ago far from
watertight--ate nothing all day--and went back to Hillside at dusk,
carrying the seeds of pneumonia under his oilskin jacket. Next day he
contrived to crawl about the gardens, reading "Burton" in an idle
desultory way that suited so desultory a book, longing for a letter from
Christabel, and sorely tired of his Scottish seclusion. On the day after
he was laid up with a sharp attack of inflammation of the lungs,
attended by his aunt's experienced old doctor--a shrewd hard-headed
Scotchman, contemporary with Simpson, Sibson, Fergusson--all the
brightest lights in the Caledonian galaxy--and nursed by one of his
aunt's old servants.
While he was in this condition there came a letter from Christabel, a
long letter which he unfolded with eager trembling hands, looking for
joy and comfort in its pages. But, as he read, his pallid cheek flushed
with angry feverish carmine, and his short hard breathing grew shorter
and harder.
Yet the letter expressed only tenderness. In tenderest words his
betrothed reminded him of past wrong-doing and urged upon him the duty
of atonement. If this girl whom he had so passionately loved a little
while ago was from society's standpoint unworthy to be his wife--it was
he who had made her unworthiness--he who alone could redeem her from
absolute shame and disgrace. "All the world knows that you wronged her,
let all the world know that you are glad to make such poor amends as may
be made for that wrong," wrote Christabel. "I forgive you all the sorrow
you have brought upon me: it was in a great measure my own fault. I was
too eager to link my life with yours. I almost thrust myself upon you. I
will revere and honour you all the days of my life, if you will do right
in this hard crisis of our fate. Knowing what I know I could never be
happy as your wife: my soul would be wrung with jealous fears; I should
never feel secure of your love; my life would be one long self-torment.
It is with this conviction that I tell you our engagement is ended,
Angus, loving you with all my heart. I have not come hurriedly to this
resolution. It is not of anybody's prompting. I have prayed to my God
for guidance. I have questioned my own heart, and I believe that I have
decided wisely and well. And so farewell, dear love. May God and your
conscience inspire you to do right.
"Your ever constant friend,
"CHRISTABEL COURTENAY."
Angus Hamleigh's first impulse was anger. Then came a softer feeling,
and he saw all the nobleness of the womanly instinct that had prompted
this letter: a good woman's profound pity for a fallen sister; an
innocent woman's readiness to see only the poetical aspect of a guilty
love; an unselfish woman's desire that right should be done, at any cost
to herself.
"God bless her!" he murmured, and kissed the letter before he laid it
under his pillow.
His next thought was to telegraph immediately to Christabel. He asked
his nurse to bring him a telegraph form and a pencil, and with a
shaking hand began to write:--
"No! a thousand times no. I owe no allegiance to any one but to you.
There can be no question of broken faith with the person of whom you
write. I hold you to your promise."
Scarcely had his feeble fingers scrawled the lines than he tore up the
paper.
"I will see the doctor first," he thought. "Am I a man to claim the
fulfilment of a bright girl's promise of marriage? No, I'll get the
doctor's verdict before I send her a word."
When the old family practitioner had finished his soundings and
questionings, Angus asked him to stop for a few minutes longer.
"You say I'm better this afternoon, and that you'll get me over this
bout," he said, "and I believe you. But I want you to go a little
further and tell me what you think of my case from a general point of
view."
"Humph," muttered the doctor, "it isn't easy to say what proportion of
your scemptoms may be temporary, and what pairmenent; but ye've a vairy
shabby pair of lungs at this praisent writing. What's your family
heestory?"
"My father died of consumption at thirty."
"Humph! ainy other relative?"
"My aunt, a girl of nineteen; my father's mother, at seven-and-twenty."
"Dear, dear, that's no vairy lively retrospaict. Is this your fairst
attack of heemorrage?"
"Not by three or four."
The good old doctor shook his head.
"Ye'll need to take extreme care of yourself," he said: "and ye'll no be
for spending much of your life in thees country. Ye might do vairy weel
in September and October at Rothsay or in the Isle of Arran, but I'd
recommaind ye to winter in the South."
"Do you think I shall be a long-lived man?"
"My dear sir, that'll depend on care and circumstances beyond human
foresight. I couldn't conscientiously recommaind your life to an
Insurance Office."
"Do you think that a man in my condition is justified in marrying?"
"Do ye want a plain answer?"
"The plainest that you can give me."
"Then I tell you frankly that I think the marriage of a man with a
marked consumptive tendency, like yours, is a crime--a crying sin, which
is inexcusable in the face of modern science and modern enlightenment,
and our advanced knowledge of the mainsprings of life and death. What,
sir, can it be less than a crime to bring into this world children
burdened with an hereditary curse, destined to a heritage of weakness
and pain--bright young minds fettered by diseased bodies--born to perish
untimely? Mr. Hamleigh, did ye ever read a book called 'Ecce Homo?'"
"Yes, it is a book of books. I know it by heart."
"Then ye'll may be remaimber the writer's summing up of practical
Chreestianity as a seestem of ethics which in its ultimate perfection
will result in the happiness of the human race--even that last enemy,
Death, if not subdued, may be made to keep his distance, seemply by a
due observance of natural laws--by an unselfish forethought and regard
in each member of the human species for the welfare of the multitude.
The man who becomes the father of a race of puny children, can be no
friend to humanity. He predooms future suffering to the innocent by a
reckless indulgence of his own inclination in the present."
"Yes, I believe you are right," said Angus, with a despairing sigh. "It
seems a hard thing for a man who loves, and is beloved by, the sweetest
among women, to forego even a few brief years of perfect bliss, and go
down lonely to the grave--to accept this doctrine of renunciation, and
count himself as one dead in life. Yet a year ago I told myself pretty
much what you have told me to-day. I was tempted from my resolve by a
woman's loving devotion--and now--a crucial point has come--and I must
decide whether to marry or not."
"If you love humanity better than you love yourself, ye'll die a
bachelor," said the Scotchman, gravely, but with infinite pity in his
shrewd old face; "ye've asked me for the truth, and I've geeven it ye.
Truth is often hard."
Angus gave his thin hot hand to the doctor in token of friendly
feeling, and then silently turned his face to the wall, whereupon the
doctor gently patted him upon the shoulder and left him.
Yes, it was hard. In the bright spring time, his health wondrously
restored by that quiet restful winter on the shores of the
Mediterranean, Angus had almost believed that he had given his enemy the
slip--that Death's dominion over him was henceforth to be no more than
over the common ruck of humanity, who, knowing not when or how the fatal
lot may fall from the urn, drop into a habit of considering themselves
immortal, and death a calamity of which one reads in the newspapers with
only a kindly interest in other people's mortality. All through the gay
London season he had been so utterly happy, so wonderfully well, that
the insidious disease, which had declared itself in the past by so many
unmistakable symptoms, seemed to have relaxed its grip upon him. He
began to have faith in an advanced medical science--the power to cure
maladies hitherto considered incurable. That long interval of languid
empty days and nights of placid sleep--the heavy sweetness of southern
air breathing over fields of orange flowers and violets, February roses
and carnations, had brought strength and healing. The foe had been
baffled by the new care which his victim had taken of an existence that
had suddenly become precious.
This was the hope that had buoyed up Angus Hamleigh's spirits all
through the happy springtime and summer which he had spent in the
company of his betrothed. He had seen the physician who less than a year
before had pronounced his sentence of doom, and the famous physician,
taking the thing in the light-hearted way of a man for whom humanity is
a collection of "cases," was jocose and congratulatory, full of wonder
at his patient's restoration, and taking credit to himself for having
recommended Hyères. And now the enemy had him by the throat. The foe, no
longer insidiously hinting at his deadly meaning, held him in the fierce
grip of pain and fever. Such an attack as this, following upon one
summer day's imprudence, showed but too plainly by how frail a tie he
clung to life--how brief and how prone to malady must be the remnant of
his days.
Before the post went out he re-read Christabel's letter, smiling
mournfully as he read.
"Poor child!" he murmured to himself, "God bless her for her
innocence--God bless her for her unselfish desire to do right. If she
only knew the truth--but, better that she should be spared the knowledge
of evil. What good end would it serve if I were to enter upon painful
explanations?"
He had himself propped up with pillows, and wrote, in a hand which he
strove to keep from shaking, the following lines:--
"Dearest! I accept your decree: not for the reasons which you
allege, which are no reasons; but for other motives which it would
pain me too much to explain. I have loved you, I do love you,
better than my own joy or comfort, better than my own life: and it
is simply and wholly on that account I can resign myself to say,
let us in the future be friends--and friends only.
"Your ever affectionate
"ANGUS HAMLEIGH."
He was so much better next day as to be able to sit up for an hour or
two in the afternoon; and during that time he wrote at length to Mrs.
Tregonell, telling her of his illness, and of his conversation with the
Scotch doctor, and the decision at which he had arrived on the strength
of that medical opinion, and leaving her at liberty to tell Christabel
as much, or as little of this, as she thought fit.
"I know you will do what is best for my darling's happiness," he said.
"If I did not believe this renunciation a sacred duty, and the only
means of saving her from infinite pain in the future, nothing that she
or even you could say about my past follies would induce me to renounce
her. I would fight that question to the uttermost. But the other fatal
fact is not to be faced, except by a blind and cowardly selfishness
which I dare not practise."
After this day, the invalid mended slowly, and old Miss MacPherson, his
aunt, being soon quite restored, Mr. Hamleigh telegraphed to his valet
to bring books and other necessaries from his chambers in the Albany,
and to meet him in the Isle of Arran, where he meant to vegetate for the
next month or two, chartering a yacht of some kind, and living half on
land and half on sea.