"WHO KNOWS NOT CIRCE?"
The autumn days crept by, sometimes grey and sad of aspect, sometimes
radiant and sunny, as if summer had risen from her grave amidst fallen
leaves and faded heather. It was altogether a lovely autumn, like that
beauteous season of five years ago, and Christabel and Angus wandered
about the hills, and lingered by the trout stream in the warm green
valley, almost as freely as they had done in the past. They were never
alone--Jessie Bridgeman was always with them--very often Dopsy and
Mopsy--and sometimes Mr. Tregonell with Captain Vandeleur and half a
dozen dogs. One day they all went up the hill, and crossed the ploughed
field to the path among the gorse and heather above Pentargon Bay--and
Dopsy and Mopsy climbed crags and knolls, and screamed affrightedly, and
made a large display of boots, and were generally fascinating after
their manner.
"If any place could tempt me to smoke it would be this," said Dopsy,
gazing seaward. All the men except Angus were smoking. "I think it must
be utterly lovely to sit dreaming over a cigarette in such a place as
this."
"What would you dream about," asked Angus. "A new bonnet?"
"Don't be cynical. You think I am awfully shallow, because I am not a
perambulating bookshelf like Mrs. Tregonell, who seems to have read all
the books that ever were printed."
"There you are wrong. She has read a few--_non multa sed multum_--but
they are the very best, and she has read them well enough to remember
them," answered Angus, quietly.
"And Mop and I often read three volumes in a day, and seldom
remember a line of what we read," sighed Dopsy. "Indeed, we are
awfully ignorant. Of course we learnt things at school--French and
German--Italian--natural history--physical geography--geology--and all
the onomies. Indeed, I shudder when I remember what a lot of learning
was poured into our poor little heads, and how soon it all ran out
again."
Dopsy gave her most fascinating giggle, and sat in an æsthetic attitude
idly plucking up faded heather blossoms with a tightly gloved hand, and
wondering whether Mr. Hamleigh noticed how small the hand was. She
thought she was going straight to his heart with these naïve
confessions; she had always heard that men hated learned women, and no
doubt Mr. Hamleigh's habit of prosing about books with Mrs. Tregonell
was merely the homage he payed to his hostess.
"You and Mrs. Tregonell are so dreadfully grave when you get together,"
pursued Dopsy, seeing that her companion held his peace. She had
contrived to be by Mr. Hamleigh's side when he crossed the field, and
had in a manner got possessed of him for the rest of the afternoon,
barring some violent struggle for emancipation on his part. "I always
wonder what you can find to say to each other."
"I don't think there is much cause for wonder. We have many tastes in
common. We are both fond of music--of Nature--and of books. There is a
wide field for conversation."
"Why won't you talk with me of books. There are some books I adore. Let
us talk about Dickens."
"With all my heart. I admire every line he wrote--I think him the
greatest genius of this age. We have had great writers--great
thinkers--great masters of style--but Scott and Dickens were the
Creators--they made new worlds and peopled them. I am quite ready to
talk about Dickens."
"I don't think I could say a single word after that outburst of yours,"
said Dopsy; "you go too fast for me."
He had talked eagerly, willing to talk just now even to Miss Vandeleur,
trying not too vividly to remember that other day--that unforgotten
hour--in which, on this spot, face to face with that ever changing, ever
changeless sea, he had submitted his fate to Christabel, not daring to
ask for her love, warning her rather against the misery that might come
to her from loving him. And misery had come, but not as he presaged. It
had come from his youthful sin, that one fatal turn upon the road of
life which he had taken so lightly, tripping with joyous companions
along a path strewn with roses. He, like so many, had gathered his roses
while he might, and had found that he had to bear the sting of their
thorns when he must.
Leonard came up behind them as they talked, Mr. Hamleigh standing by
Miss Vandeleur's side, digging his stick into the heather and staring
idly at the sea.
"What are you two talking about so earnestly?" he asked; "you are always
together. I begin to understand why Hamleigh is so indifferent to
sport."
The remark struck Angus as strange, as well as underbred. Dopsy had
contrived to inflict a good deal of her society upon him at odd times;
but he had taken particular care that nothing in his bearing or
discourse should compromise either himself or the young lady.
Dopsy giggled faintly, and looked modestly at the heather. It was still
early in the afternoon, and the western light shone full upon a face
which might have been pretty if Nature's bloom had not long given place
to the poetic pallor of the powder-puff.
"We were talking about Dickens," said Dopsy, with an elaborate air of
struggling with the tumult of her feelings. "Don't you adore him?"
"If you mean the man who wrote books, I never read 'em," answered
Leonard; "life isn't long enough for books that don't teach you
anything. I've read pretty nearly every book that was ever written upon
horses and dogs and guns, and a good many on mechanics; that's enough
for me. I don't care for books that only titillate one's imagination.
Why should one read books to make oneself cry and to make oneself laugh?
It's as idiotic a habit as taking snuff to make oneself sneeze."
"That's rather a severe way of looking at the subject," said Angus.
"It's a practical way, that's all. My wife surfeits herself with poetry.
She is stuffed with Tennyson and Browning, loaded to the very muzzle
with Byron and Shelley. She reads Shakespeare as devoutly as she reads
her Bible. But I don't see that it helps to make her pleasant company
for her husband or her friends. She is never so happy as when she has
her nose in a book; give her a bundle of books and a candle and she
would be happy in the little house on the top of Willapark."
"Not without you and her boy," said Dopsy, gushingly. "She could never
exist without you two."
Mr. Tregonell lit himself another cigar, and strolled off without a
word.
"He has not lovable manners, has he?" inquired Dopsy, with her childish
air; "but he is so good-hearted."
"No doubt. You have known him some time, haven't you?" inquired Angus,
who had been struggling with an uncomfortable yearning to kick the
Squire into the Bay.
The scene offered such temptations. They were standing on the edge of
the amphitheatre, the ground shelving steeply downward in front of them,
rocks and water below. And to think that she--his dearest, she, all
gentleness and refinement, was mated to this coarse clay! Was King Marc
such an one as this he wondered, and if he were, who could be angry with
Tristan--Tristan who died longing to see his lost love--struck to death
by his wife's cruel lie--Tristan whose passionate soul passed by
metempsychosis into briar and leaf, and crept across the arid rock to
meet and mingle with the beloved dead. Oh, how sweet and sad the old
legend seemed to Angus to-day, standing above the melancholy sea, where
he and she had stood folded in each other's arms in the sweet triumphant
moment of love's first avowal.
Dopsy did not allow him much leisure for mournful meditation. She
prattled on in that sweetly girlish manner which was meant to be all
spirit and sparkle--glancing from theme to theme, like the butterfly
among the flowers, and showing a level ignorance on all. Mr. Hamleigh
listened with Christian resignation, and even allowed himself to be her
escort home--and to seem especially attentive to her at afternoon tea:
for although it may take two to make a quarrel, assuredly one, if she be
but brazen enough, may make a flirtation. Dopsy felt that time was
short, and that strong measures were necessary. Mr. Hamleigh had been
very polite--attentive even. Dopsy, accustomed to the free and easy
manners of her brother's friends, mistook Mr. Hamleigh's natural
courtesy to the sex for particular homage to the individual. But he had
"said nothing," and she was no nearer the assurance of becoming Mrs.
Hamleigh than she had been on the evening of his arrival. Dopsy had been
fain to confess this to Mopsy in the confidence of sisterly discourse.
"It seems as if I might just as well have had a try for him myself,
instead of standing out to give you a better chance," retorted Mopsy,
somewhat scornfully.
"Go in and win, if you can," said Dopsy. "It won't be the first time
you've tried to cut me out."
Dopsy, embittered by the sense of failure, determined on new tactics.
Hitherto she had been all sparkle--now she melted into a touching
sadness.
"What a delicious old room this is," she murmured, glancing round at the
bookshelves and dark panelling, the high wide chimney piece with its
coat-of-arms, in heraldic colours, flashing and gleaming against a
background of brown oak. "I cannot help feeling wretched at the idea
that next week I shall be far away from this dear place--in dingy,
dreary London. Oh, Mr. Hamleigh,"--detaining him while she selected one
particular piece of sugar from the basin he was handing her--"don't you
detest London?"
"Not absolutely. I have sometimes found it endurable."
"Ah, you have your clubs--just the one pleasantest street in all the
great overgrown city--and that street lined with palaces, whose doors
are always standing open for you. Libraries, smoking rooms,
billiard-tables, perfect dinners, and all that is freshest and brightest
in the way of society. I don't wonder men like London. But for women it
has only two attractions--Mudie, and the shop-windows!"
"And the park--the theatres--the churches--the delight of looking at
other women's gowns and bonnets. I thought that could never pall?"
"It does, though. There comes a time when one feels weary of
everything," said Dopsy, pensively stirring her tea, and so fixing Mr.
Hamleigh with her conversation that he was obliged to linger--yea, even
to set down his own teacup on an adjacent table, and to seat himself by
the charmer's side.
"I thought you so delighted in the theatres," he said. "You were full of
enthusiasm about the drama the night I first dined here."
"Was I?" demanded Dopsy, naïvely. "And now I feel as if I did not care a
straw about all the plays that were ever acted--all the actors who ever
lived. Strange, is it not, that one can change so, in one little
fortnight."
"The change is an hallucination. You are fascinated by the charms of a
rural life, which you have not known long enough for satiety. You will
be just as fond of plays and players when you get back to London."
"Never," exclaimed Dopsy. "It is not only my taste that is changed. It
is myself. I feel as if I were a new creature."
"What a blessing for yourself and society if the change were radical,"
said Mr. Hamleigh, within himself; and then he answered, lightly.
"Perhaps you have been attending the little chapel at Boscastle,
secretly imbibing the doctrines of advanced Methodism, and this is a
spiritual awakening."
"No," sighed Dopsy, shaking her head, pensively, as she gazed at her
teacup. "It is an utter change. I cannot make it out. I don't think I
shall ever care for gaiety--parties--theatres--dress--again."
"Oh, this must be the influence of the Methodists."
"I hate Methodists! I never spoke to one in my life. I should like to go
into a convent. I should like to belong to a Protestant sisterhood, and
to nurse the poor in their own houses. It would be nasty; I should catch
some dreadful complaint, and die, I daresay; but it would be better than
what I feel now."
And Dopsy, taking advantage of the twilight, and the fact that she and
Angus were at some distance from the rest of the party, burst into
tears. They were very real tears--tears of vexation, disappointment,
despair; and they made Angus very uncomfortable.
"My dear Miss Vandeleur, I am so sorry to see you distressed. Is there
anything on your mind? Is there anything that I can do. Shall I fetch
your sister."
"No, no," gasped Dopsy, in a choked voice. "Please don't go away. I like
you to be near me."
She put out her hand--a chilly, tremulous hand, with no passion in it
save the passionate pain of despair, and touched his, timidly,
entreatingly, as if she were calling upon him for pity and help. She
was, indeed, in her inmost heart, asking him to rescue her from the
great dismal swamp of poverty and disrepute: to take her to himself, and
give her a place and status among well-bred people, and make her life
worth living.
This was dreadful. Angus Hamleigh, in all the variety of his experience
of womankind, had never before found himself face to face with this kind
of difficulty. He had not been blind to Miss Vandeleur's strenuous
endeavours to charm him. He had parried those light arrows lightly: but
he was painfully embarrassed by this appeal to his compassion. It was a
new thing for him to sit beside a weeping woman, whom he could neither
love nor admire, but from whom he could not withhold his pity.
"I daresay her life is dismal enough," he thought, "with such a brother
as Poker Vandeleur--and a father to match."
While he sat in silent embarrassment, and while Dopsy slowly dried her
tears with a gaudy little coloured handkerchief, taken from a smart
little breast-pocket in the tailor-gown, Mr. Tregonell sauntered across
the room to the window where they sat--a Tudor window, with a deep
embrasure.
"What are you two talking about in the dark?" he asked, as Dopsy
confusedly shuffled the handkerchief back into the breast-pocket.
"Something very sentimental, I should think, from the look of you.
Poetry, I suppose."
Dopsy said not a word. She believed that Leonard meant well by
her--that, if his influence could bring Mr. Hamleigh's nose to the
grindstone, to the grindstone that nose would be brought. So she looked
up at her brother's friend with a watery smile, and remained mute.
"We were talking about London and the theatres," answered Angus. "Not a
very sentimental topic;" and then he got up and walked away with his
teacup, to the table near which Christabel was sitting, in the
flickering firelight, and seated himself by her side, and began to talk
to her about a box of books that had arrived from London that day--books
that were familiar to him and new to her. Leonard looked after him with
a scowl, safe in the shadow; while Dopsy, feeling that she had made a
fool of herself, lapsed again into tears.
"I am afraid he is behaving very badly to you," said Leonard.
"Oh, no, no. But he has such strange ways. He blows hot and cold."
"In plain words, he's a heartless flirt," answered Leonard, impatiently.
"He has been fooled by a pack of women--pretends to be dying of
consumption--gives himself no end of airs. He has flirted outrageously
with you. Has he proposed?"
"No----not exactly," faltered Dopsy.
"Some one ought to bring him to the scratch. Your brother must tackle
him."
"Don't you think if--if--Jack were to say anything--were just to hint
that I was being made very unhappy--that such marked attentions before
all the world put me in a false position--don't you think it might do
harm?"
"Quite the contrary. It would do good. No man ought to trifle with a
girl's feelings in that way. No man shall be allowed to do it in my
house. If Jack won't speak to him, I will."
"Oh, Mr. Vandeleur, what a noble heart you have--what a true friend you
have always been to us."
"You are my friend's sister--my wife's guest. I won't see you trifled
with."
"And you really think his attentions have been marked?"
"Very much marked. He shall not be permitted to amuse himself at your
expense. There he sits, talking sentiment to my wife--just as he has
talked sentiment to you. Why doesn't he keep on the safe side, and
confine his attentions to married women?"
"You are not jealous of him?" asked Dopsy, with some alarm.
"Jealous! I! It would take a very extraordinary kind of wife, and a very
extraordinary kind of admirer of that wife, to make _me_ jealous."
Dopsy felt her hopes in somewise revived by Mr. Tregonell's manner of
looking at things. Up to this point she had mistrusted exceedingly that
the flirting was all on her side: but now Leonard most distinctly
averred that Angus Hamleigh had flirted, and in a manner obvious to
every one. And if Mr. Hamleigh really admired her--if he were really
blowing hot and cold--inclining one day to make her his wife, and on
another day disposed to let her languish and fade in South
Belgravia--might not a word or two from a judicious friend turn the
scale, and make her happy for life.
She went up to her room to dress in a flutter of hope and fear; so
agitated, that she could scarcely manage the more delicate details of
her toilet--the drapery of her skirt, the adjustment of the sunflower on
her shoulder.
"How flushed and shaky you are," exclaimed Mopsy, pausing in the
pencilling of an eyebrow to look at her sister. "Is the deed done? Has
he popped?"
"No, he has not popped. But I think he will."
"I wish I were of your opinion. I should like a rich sister. It would be
the next best thing to being well off oneself."
"You only think of his money," said Dopsy, who had really fallen in
love--for only about the fifteenth time, so there was still freshness in
the feeling--"I should care for him just as much if he were a pauper."
"No; you would not," said Mopsy. "I daresay you think you would, but you
wouldn't. There is a glamour about money which nobody in our
circumstances can resist. A man who dresses perfectly--who has never
been hard up--who has always lived among elegant people--there is a
style about him that goes straight to one's heart. Don't you remember
how in "Peter Wilkins" there are different orders of beings--a superior
class--born so, bred so--always apart and above the others. Mr. Hamleigh
belongs to that higher order. If he were poor and shabby he would be a
different person. You wouldn't care twopence for him."
The Rector of Trevalga and his wife dined at Mount Royal that evening,
so Dopsy fell to the lot of Mr. Hamleigh, and had plenty of opportunity
of carrying on the siege during dinner, while Mrs. Tregonell and the
Rector, who was an enthusiastic antiquarian, talked of the latest
discoveries in Druidic remains.
After dinner came the usual adjournment to billiards. The Rector and his
wife stayed in the drawing-room with Christabel and Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh
would have remained with them, but Leonard specially invited him to the
billiard-room.
"You must have had enough Mendelssohn and Beethoven to last you for the
next six months," he said. "You had better come and have a smoke with
us."
"I could never have too much good music," answered Angus.
"Well, I don't suppose you'd get much to night. The Rector and my wife
will talk about pots and pans all the evening, now they've once started.
You may as well be sociable, for once-in-a-way, and come with us."
Such an invitation, given in heartiest tones, and with seeming
frankness, could hardly be refused. So Angus went across the hall with
the rest of the billiard players, to the fine old room, once a chapel,
in which there was space enough for settees, and easy chairs,
tea-tables, books, flowers, and dogs, without the slightest
inconvenience to the players.
"You'll play, Hamleigh?" said Leonard.
"No, thanks; I'd rather sit and smoke and watch you."
"Really! Then Monty and I will play Jack and one of the girls. Billiards
is the only game at which one can afford to play against relations--they
can't cheat. Mopsy, will you play? Dopsy can mark.'"
"What a thorough good fellow he is," thought Dopsy, charmed with an
arrangement which left her comparatively free for flirtation with Mr.
Hamleigh, who had taken possession of Christabel's favourite seat--a low
capacious basket-chair--by the wide wood fire, and had Christabel's
table near him, loaded with her books, and work-basket--those books
which were all his favourites as well as hers, and which made an
indissoluble link between them. What is mere blood relationship compared
with the subtler tie of mutual likings and dislikings?
The men all lighted their cigarettes, and the game progressed with
tolerably equal fortunes, Jack Vandeleur playing well enough to make
amends for any lack of skill on the part of Mopsy, whose want of the
scientific purpose and certainty which come from long experience, was as
striking as her dashing and self-assured method of handling her cue, and
her free use of all slang terms peculiar to the game. Dopsy oscillated
between the marking-board and the fireplace--sometimes kneeling on the
Persian rug to play with Randie and the other dogs, sometimes standing
in a pensive attitude by the chimney-piece, talking to Angus. All
traces of tears were gone. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes brightened
by an artful touch of Indian ink under the lashes, her eyebrows
accentuated by the same artistic treatment, her large fan held with the
true Grosvenor Gallery air.
"Do you believe that peacocks' feathers are unlucky?" she asked, looking
pensively at the fringe of green and azure plumage on her fan.
"I am not altogether free from superstition, but my idea of the fates
has never taken that particular form. Why should the peacock be a bird
of evil omen? I can believe anything bad of the screech-owl or the
raven--but the harmless ornamental peacock--surely he is innocent of our
woes."
"I have known the most direful calamities follow the introduction of
peacocks' feathers into a drawing-room--yet they are so tempting, one
can hardly live without them."
"Really! Do you know that I have found existence endurable without so
much as a tuft of down from that unmelodious bird?"
"Have you never longed for its plumage to give life and colour to your
rooms?--such exquisite colour--such delicious harmony--I wonder that
you, who have such artistic taste, can resist the fascination."
"I hope you have not found that pretty fan the cause of many woes?"
said Mr. Hamleigh, smilingly, as the damsel posed herself in the early
Italian manner, and slowly waved the bright-hued plumage.
"I cannot say that I have been altogether happy since I possessed it,"
answered Dopsy, with a shy downward glance, and a smothered sigh; "and
yet I don't know--I have been only too happy sometimes, perhaps, and at
other times deeply wretched."
"Is not that kind of variableness common to our poor human
nature--independent of peacocks' feathers?"
"Not to me. I used to be the most thoughtless happy-go-lucky creature."
"Until when?"
"Till I came to Cornwall," with a faint sigh, and a sudden upward glance
of a pair of blue eyes which would have been pretty, had they been only
innocent of all scheming.
"Then I'm afraid this mixture of sea and mountain air does not agree
with you. Too exciting for your nerves perhaps."
"I don't think it is that," with a still fainter sigh.
"Then the peacocks' feathers must be to blame. Why don't you throw your
fan into the fire?"
"Not for worlds," said Dopsy.
"Why not?"
"First, because it cost a guinea," naïvely, "and then because it is
associated with quite the happiest period of my life."
"You said just now you had been unhappy since you owned it."
"Only by fits and starts. Too utterly happy at other times."
"If I say another word she will dissolve into tears again," thought
Angus. "I shall have to leave Mount Royal: a man in weak health is no
match for a young woman of this type. She will get me into a corner and
declare I have proposed to her."
He got up and went over to the table, where Mr. Montagu was just
finishing the game, with a break which had left Dopsy free for
flirtation during the last ten minutes.
Mr. Hamleigh played in the next game, but this hardly bettered his
condition, for Dopsy now took her sister's place with the cue, and
required to be instructed as to every stroke, and even to have her
fingers placed in position, now and then by Angus, when the ball was
under the cushion, and the stroke in any way difficult. This lengthened
the game, and bored Angus exceedingly, besides making him ridiculous in
the eyes of the other three men.
"I hate playing with lovers," muttered Leonard, under his breath, when
Dopsy was especially worrying about the exact point at which she was to
hit the ball for a particular cannon.
"Decidedly I must get away to-morrow," reflected Angus.
The game went on merrily enough, and was only just over when the stable
clock struck eleven, at which hour the servants brought in a tray with a
tankard of mulled claret for vice, and a siphon for virtue. The Miss
Vandeleurs, after pretending to say good-night, were persuaded to sip a
little of the hot spiced wine, and were half inclined to accept the
cigarettes persuasively offered by Mr. Montagu; till, warned by a wink
from Jack, they drew up suddenly, declared they had been quite too
awfully dissipated, that they should be too late to wish Mrs. Tregonell
good-night, and skipped away.
"Awfully jolly girls, those sisters of yours," said Montagu, as he
closed the door which he had opened for the damsels' exit, and strolled
back to the hearth, where Angus was sitting dreamily caressing
Randie--her dog! How many a happy dog has received caresses charged with
the love of his mistress, such mournful kisses as Dido lavished on the
young Ascanias in the dead watches of the weary night.
Jack Vandeleur and his host had begun another game, delighted at having
the table to themselves.
"Yes, they're nice girls," answered Mr. Vandeleur, without looking off
the table; "just the right kind of girls for a country-house: no starch,
no prudishness, but as innocent as babies, and as true-hearted--well,
they are all heart. I should be sorry to see anybody trifle with either
of them. It would be a very serious thing for her--and it should be my
business to make it serious for him."
"Great advantage for a girl to have a brother who enjoys the reputation
of being a dead shot," said Mr. Montagu, "or it would be if duelling
were not an exploded institution--like trial for witchcraft, and hanging
for petty larceny."
"Duelling is never out of fashion, among gentlemen," answered Jack,
making a cannon and going in off the red. "That makes seventeen, Monty.
There are injuries which nothing but the pistol can redress, and I'm not
sorry that my Red River experience has made me a pretty good shot. But
I'm not half as good as Leonard. He could give me fifty in a hundred any
day."
"When a man has to keep his party in butcher's meat by the use of his
rifle, he'd need be a decent marksman," answered Mr. Tregonell,
carelessly. "I never knew the right use of a gun till I crossed the
Rockies. By-the-way, who is for woodcock shooting to-morrow? You'll
come, I suppose, Jack?"
"Not to-morrow, thanks. Monty and I are going over to Bodmin to see a
man hanged. We've got an order to view, as the house-agents call it.
Monty is supposed to be on the _Times_. I go for the _Western Daily
Mercury_."
"What a horrid ghoulish thing to do," said Leonard.
"It's seeing life," answered Jack, shrugging his shoulders.
"I should call it the other thing. However, as crime is very rare in
Cornwall, you may as well make the most of your opportunity. But it's a
pity to neglect the birds. This is one of the best seasons we've had
since 1860, when there was a remarkable flight of birds in the second
week in October. But even that year wasn't as good as '55, when a farmer
at St. Buryan killed close upon sixty birds in a week. You'll go
to-morrow, I hope, Mr. Hamleigh? There's some very good ground about St.
Nectan's Kieve, and it's a picturesque sort of place, that will just hit
your fancy."
"I have been to the Kieve, often--yes, it is a lovely spot," answered
Angus, remembering his first visit to Mount Royal, and the golden
afternoons which he had spent with Christabel among the rocks and the
ferns, their low voices half drowned by the noise of the waterfall. "But
I shan't be able to shoot to-morrow. I have just been making up my mind
to tear myself away from Mount Royal, and I was going to ask you to let
one of your grooms drive me over to Launceston in time for the mid-day
train. I can get up from Plymouth by the Limited Mail."
"Why are you in such a hurry?" asked Leonard. "I thought you were rather
enjoying yourself with us."
"So much so that as far as my own inclination goes there is no reason
why I should not stay here for the rest of my life--only you would get
tired of me--and I have promised my doctor to go southward before the
frosty weather begins."
"A day or two can't make much difference."
"Not much--only when there is a disagreeable effort to be made the
sooner one gets it over the better."
"I am sorry you are off so suddenly," said Leonard, going on with the
game, and looking rather oddly across the table at Captain Vandeleur.
"I am more than sorry," said that gentleman, "I am surprised. But
perhaps I am not altogether in the secret of your movements."
"There is no secret," said Angus.
"Isn't there? Then I'm considerably mistaken. It has looked very much
lately as if there were a particular understanding between you and my
elder sister; and I think, as her brother, I have some right to be let
into the secret before you leave Mount Royal."
"I am sorry that either my manner, or Miss Vandeleur's, should have so
far misled you," answered Angus, with freezing gravity. He pitied the
sister, but felt only cold contempt for the brother. "The young lady and
I have never interchanged a word which might not have been heard by
everybody at Mount Royal."
"And you have had no serious intentions--you have never pretended to any
serious feeling about her."
"Never. Charming as the young lady may be, I have been, and am, adamant
against all such fascinations. A man who has been told that he may not
live a year is hardly in a position to make an offer of marriage.
Good-night, Tregonell. I shall rely on your letting one of your men
drive me to the station."
He nodded good-night to the other two men, and left the room. Randie,
who loved him for the sake of old times, followed at his heels.
"There goes a cur who deserves a dose of cold lead," said Jack, looking
vindictively towards the door.
"What, Randie, my wife's favourite?"
"No, the two-legged cur. Come, you two men know how outrageously that
puppy has flirted with my sister."
"I know there has been--some kind of flirtation," answered Mr. Montagu,
luxuriously buried in a large armchair, with his legs hanging over the
arm, "and I suppose it's the man who's to blame. Of course it always is
the man."
"Did you ever hear such a sneaking evasion?" demanded Jack. "Not a year
to live forsooth. Why if he can't make her his wife he is bound as a
gentleman to make her his widow."
"He has plenty of coin, hasn't he?" asked Montagu. "Your sister has
never gone for me--and I'm dreadfully soft under such treatment. When I
think of the number of girls I've proposed to, and how gracefully I've
always backed out of it afterwards, I really wonder at my own audacity.
I never refuse to marry the lady--_pas si bête_: 'I adore you, and we'll
be married to-morrow if you like,' I say. 'But you'll have to live with
your papa and mamma for the first ten years. Perhaps by that time I
might be able to take second-floor lodgings in Bloomsbury, and we could
begin housekeeping.'"
"You're a privileged pauper," said Captain Vandeleur; "Mr. Hamleigh is
quite another kind of individual--and I say that he has behaved in a
dastardly manner to my elder sister. Everybody in this house thought
that he was in love with her."
"You have told us so several times," answered Montagu, coolly, "and
we're bound to believe you, don't you know."
"I should have thought you'd have had too much spunk to see an old
friend's sister jilted in such a barefaced way, Tregonell," said Jack
Vandeleur, who had drunk just enough to make him quarrelsome.
"You don't mean to say that I'm accountable for his actions, do you?"
retorted Leonard. "That's rather a large order."
"I mean to say that you asked him here--and you puffed him off as a
great catch--and half turned poor little Dop's head by your talk about
him. If you knew what an arrant flirt he was you oughtn't to have
brought him inside your doors."
"Perhaps I didn't know anything about it," answered Leonard, with his
most exasperating air.
"Then I can only say that if half I've heard is true you ought to have
known all about it."
"As how?"
"Because it's common club-talk that he flirted with your wife--was
engaged to her--and was thrown off by her on account of his extremely
disreputable antecedents. Your mother has the sole credit of the
throwing off, by-the-by."
"You had better leave my mother's name and my wife's name out of your
conversation. That's twenty-eight to me, Monty. Poker has spoiled a
capital break by his d----d personality."
"I beg your pardon--Mrs. Tregonell is simply perfect, and there is no
woman I more deeply honour. But still you must allow me to wonder that
you ever let that man cross your threshold."
"You are welcome to go on wondering. It's a wholesome exercise for a
sluggish brain."
"Game," exclaimed Mr. Montagu; and Leonard put his cue in the rack, and
walked away, without another word to either of his guests.
"He's a dreadful bear," said little Monty, emptying the tankard; "but
you oughtn't to have talked about the wife, Poker--that was bad form."
"Does he ever study good form when he talks of my people? He had no
business to bring that fine gentleman here to flirt with my sister."
"But really now, don't you think your sister did her share of the
flirting, and that she's rather an old hand at that kind of thing? I
adore Dop and Mop, as I'm sure you know, and I only wish I were rich
enough to back my opinion by marrying one of them--but I don't think our
dear little Dopsy is the kind of girl to break her heart about any
man--more especially a sentimental duffer with hollow cheeks and a
hollow cough."
"Just the kind of man to interest a warm-hearted girl. No more claret!
Well, I suppose we may as well go to roost."