"AND TIME IS SETTING WI' ME, O."
Angus Hamleigh left the billiard players with the intention of going
straight to his own room; but in the hall he encountered the Rector of
Trevalga, who was just going away, very apologetic at having stayed so
late, beguiled by the fascination of antiquarian talk. Christabel and
Jessie had come out to the hall, to bid their old friends good-night,
and thus it happened that Mr. Hamleigh went back to the drawing-room,
and sat there talking till nearly midnight. They sat in front of the
dying fire, talking as they had talked in days gone by--and their
conversation grew sad and solemn as the hour wore on. Angus announced
his intended departure, and Christabel had no word to say against his
decision.
"We shall be very sorry to lose you," she said, sheltering her
personality behind the plural pronoun, "but I think it is wise of you
to waste no more time."
"I have not wasted an hour. It has been unspeakable happiness for me to
be here--and I am more grateful than I can say to your husband for
having brought me here--for having treated me with such frank
cordiality. The time has come when I may speak very freely--yes--a man
whose race is so nearly run need have no reserves of thought or feeling.
I think, Mrs. Tregonell, that you and Miss Bridgeman, who knows me
almost as well as you do----"
"Better, perhaps," murmured Jessie, in a scarcely audible voice.
"Must both know that my life for the last four years has been one long
regret--that all my days and hours have been steeped in the bitterness
of remorse. I am not going now to dispute the justice of the sentence
which spoiled my life and broke my heart. I submitted without question,
because I knew that the decree was wise. I had no right to offer you the
ruin of a life----"
"Do not speak of that," cried Christabel, with a stifled sob, "for
pity's sake don't speak of the past: I cannot bear it."
"Then I will not say another word, except to tell you that your goodness
to me in these latter days--your friendship, so frankly, so freely
given--has steeped my soul in peace--has filled my mind with sweet
memories which will sooth my hours of decline, when I am far from this
dear house where I was once so happy. I wish I could leave some pleasant
memory here when I am gone--I wish your boy had been old enough to
remember me in the days to come, as one who loved him better than any
one on earth could love him, after his father and mother."
Christabel answered no word. She sat with her hand before her
eyes--tears streaming slowly down her cheeks--tears that were happily
invisible in the faint light of the shaded lamps and the fading fire.
And then they went on to talk of life in the abstract--its
difficulties--its problems--its consolations--and of death--and the dim
world beyond--the unknown land of universal recompense, where the deep
joys striven after here, and never attained, are to be ours in a purer
and more spiritual form--where love shall no longer walk hand in hand
with pain and sorrow, dogged by the dark spectre Death.
Illness and solitude had done much to exalt and spiritualize Angus
Hamleigh's mind. The religion of dogma, the strict hard-and-fast creed
which was the breath of life to Leonard's mother, had never been
grappled with or accepted by him--but it was in his nature to be
religious. Never at his worst had he sheltered his errors under the
brazen front of paganism--never had he denied the beauty of a pure and
perfect life, a simple childlike faith, heroic self-abnegating love of
God and man. He had admired and honoured such virtue in others, and had
been sorry that Nature had cast him in a lower mould. Then had come the
sentence which told him that his days here were to be of the fewest,
and, without conscious effort, his thoughts had taken a more serious
cast. The great problem had come nearer home to him--and he had found
its only solution to be hope--hope more or less vague and dim--more or
less secure and steadfast--according to the temperament of the thinker.
All metaphysical argument for or against--all theological teaching could
push the thing no further. It seemed to him that it was the universal
instinct of mankind to desire and hope for an imperishable life, purer,
better, fairer than the life we know here--and that innate in every
human breast there dwells capacity for immortality, and disbelief in
extinction--and to this universal instinct he surrendered himself
unreservedly, content to demand no stronger argument than that grand
chapter of Corinthians which has consoled so many generations of
mourners.
So now, speaking with these two women of the life to come--the fair,
sweet, all-satisfying life after death--he breathed no word which the
most orthodox churchman might not have approved. He spoke in the fulness
of a faith which, based on instinct, and not on dogma, had ripened with
the decline of all delight and interest in this lower life. He spoke as
a man for whom earth's last moorings had been loosened, whose only
hopes pointed skyward.
It was while he was talking thus, with an almost passionate earnestness,
and yet wholly free from all earthly passion, that Mr. Tregonell entered
the room and stood by the door, contemplating the group by the hearth.
The spectacle was not pleasant to a man of intensely jealous
temperament, a man who had been testing and proving the wife whom he
could not completely trust, whom he loved grudgingly, with a savage
half-angry love.
Christabel's face, dimly lighted by the lamp on the low table near her,
was turned towards the speaker, the lips parted, the large blue eyes
bright with emotion. Her hands were clasped upon the elbow of the chair,
and her attitude was of one who listens to words of deepest, dearest
meaning; while Angus Hamleigh sat a little way off with his eyes upon
her face, his whole air and expression charged with feeling. To
Leonard's mind all such earnestness, all sentiment of any kind, came
under one category: it all meant love-making, more or less audacious,
more or less hypocritical, dressed in modern phraseology, sophisticated,
disguised, super-refined, fantastical, called one day æstheticism and
peacock's feathers, another day positivism, agnosticism,
Swinburne-cum-Burne-Jones-ism, but always the same thing _au fond_, and
meaning war to domestic peace. There sat Jessie Bridgeman, the dragon of
prudery placed within call, but was any woman safer for the presence of
a duenna? was it not in the nature of such people to look on simperingly
while the poison cup was being quaffed, and to declare afterwards that
they had supposed the mixture perfectly harmless? No doubt, Tristan and
Iseult had somebody standing by to play propriety when they drank from
the fatal goblet, and bound themselves for life in the meshes of an
unhappy love. No, the mere fact of Miss Bridgeman's presence was no
pledge of safety.
There was no guilt in Mrs. Tregonell's countenance, assuredly, when she
looked up and saw her husband standing near the door, watchful, silent,
with a pre-occupied air that was strange to him.
"What is the matter, Leonard?" she asked, for his manner implied that
something was amiss.
"Nothing--I--I was wondering to find you up so late--that's all."
"The Rector and his wife stayed till eleven, and we have been sitting
here talking. Mr. Hamleigh means to leave us to-morrow."
"Yes, I know," answered Leonard, curtly. "Oh, by the way," turning to
Angus, "there is something I want to say to you before you go to bed;
something about your journey to-morrow."
"I am quite at your service."
Instead of approaching the group by the fireplace, Leonard turned and
left the room, leaving Mr. Hamleigh under the necessity of following
him.
"Good-night," he said, shaking hands with Christabel. "I shall not say
good-bye till to-morrow. I suppose I shall not have to leave Mount Royal
till eleven o'clock."
"I think not."
"Good-night, Miss Bridgeman. I shall never forget how kind you have been
to me."
She looked at him earnestly, but made no reply, and in the next instant
he was gone.
"What can have happened?" asked Christabel anxiously. "I am sure there
is something wrong. Leonard's manner was so strange."
"Perhaps he and his dear friends have been quarrelling," Jessie
answered, carelessly. "I believe Captain Vandeleur breaks out into
vindictive language, sometimes, after he has taken a little too much
wine: Mop told me as much in her amiable candour. And I know the
Captain's glass was filled very often at dinner, for I had the honour of
sitting next him."
"I hope there is nothing really wrong," said Christabel; but she could
not get rid of the sense of uneasiness to which Leonard's strange manner
had given rise.
She went to her boy's nursery, as she did every night, before going to
bed, and said her prayers beside his pillow. She had begun this one
night when the child was ill, and had never missed a night since. That
quiet recess in which the little one's cot stood was her oratory. Here,
in the silence, broken only by the ticking of the clock or the fall of a
cinder on the hearth, while the nurse slept near at hand, the mother
prayed; and her prayers seemed to her sweeter and more efficacious here
than in any other place. So soon as those childish lips could speak it
would be her delight to teach her son to pray; and, in the meantime, her
supplications went up to Heaven for him, from a heart that overflowed
with motherly love. There had been one dismal interval of her life when
she had loved no one--having really no one to love--secretly loathing
her husband--not daring even to remember that other, once so fondly
loved--and then, when her desolate heart seemed walled round with an icy
barrier that divided it from all human feeling, God had given her this
child, and lo! the ice had melted, and her re-awakened soul had kindled
and glowed with warmth and gladness. It was not in Christabel's nature
to love many things, or many people: rather was it natural to her to
love one person intensely, as she had loved her adopted mother in her
girlhood, as she had loved Angus Hamleigh in the bloom of her womanhood,
as she loved her boy now.
She was leaving the child's room, after prayers and meditations that had
been somewhat longer than usual, when she heard voices, and saw Mr.
Tregonell and Mr. Hamleigh by the door of the room occupied by the
latter, which was at the further end of the gallery.
"You understand my plan?" said Leonard.
"Perfectly."
"It prevents all trouble, don't you see."
"Yes, I believe it may," answered Angus, and without any word of
good-night he opened his door and went into his room, while Leonard
turned on his heel, and strolled to his own quarters.
"Was there anything amiss between you and Mr. Hamleigh, that you parted
so coldly just now?" asked Christabel, presently, when her husband came
from his dressing-room into the bedroom where she sat musing by the
fire.
"What, aren't you gone to bed yet!" he exclaimed. "You seem to be
possessed by a wakeful demon to-night."
"I have been in the boy's room. _Was_ there anything amiss, Leonard?"
"You are monstrously anxious about it. No. What should there be amiss?
You didn't expect to see us hugging each other like a couple of
Frenchmen, did you?"
END OF VOL. II.