Mount Royal Volume Ii Part 7

"As I would have refused any other man, Auntie. I have made up my mind to live and die unmarried. It is the only tribute I can offer to one I loved so well."

"And who proved so unworthy of your love," said Mrs. Tregonell, moodily.

"Do not speak of him, if you cannot speak kindly. You once loved his father, but you seem to have forgotten that. Let me go away for a little while, Auntie--a few months only, if you like. My presence in this house only does harm. Leonard is angry with me--and you are angry for his sake. We are all unhappy now--n.o.body talks freely--or laughs--or takes life pleasantly. We all feel constrained and miserable. Let me go, dear.

When I am gone you and Leonard can be happy together."

"No, Belle, we cannot. You have spoiled his life. You have broken his heart."

Christabel smiled a little contemptuously at the mother's wailing.

"Hearts are not so easily broken," she said, "Leonard's least of all. He is angry because for the first time in his life he finds himself thwarted. He wants to marry me, and I don't want to marry him. Do you remember how angry he was when he wanted to go out shooting, at eleven years of age, and you refused him a gun? He moped and fretted for a week, and you were quite as unhappy as he was. It is almost the first thing I remember about him. When he found you were quite firm in your refusal, he left off sulking, and reconciled himself to the inevitable.

He will do just the same about this refusal of mine--when I am out of his sight. But my presence here irritates him."

"Christabel, if you leave me I shall know that you have never loved me,"

said Mrs. Tregonell, with sudden vehemence. "You must know that I am dying--very slowly, perhaps--a wearisome decay for those who can only watch and wait, and bear with me till I am dead. But I know and feel that I am dying. This trouble will hasten my end, and instead of dying in peace, with the a.s.surance of my boy's happy future--with the knowledge that he will have a virtuous and loving wife, a wife of my own training, to guide him and influence him for good--I shall die miserable, fearing that he may fall into evil hands, and that evil days may come upon him. I know how impetuous, how impulsive he is; how easily governed through his feelings, how little able to rule himself by hard common-sense. And you, who have known him all your life--who know the best and worst of him--you can be so indifferent to his happiness, Christabel. How can I believe, in the face of this, that you ever loved me, his mother?"

"I have loved you as _my_ mother," replied the girl, with her arms round her aunt's neck, her lips pressed against that pale thin cheek. "I love you better than any one in this world. If G.o.d would spare you for years to come, and we could live always together, and be all in all to each other as we have been, I think I could be quite happy. Yes, I could feel as if there were nothing wanting in this life. But I cannot marry a man I do not love, whom I never can love."

"He would take you on trust, Belle," murmured the mother, imploringly; "he would be content with duty and good faith. I know how true and loyal you are, dearest, and that you would be a perfect wife. Love would come afterwards."

"Will it make you happier if I don't go away, Auntie?" asked Christabel, gently.

"Much happier."

"Then I will stay; and Leonard may be as rude to me as he likes; he may do anything disagreeable, except kick Randie; and I will not murmur. But you and I must never talk of him as we have talked to-day: it can do no good."

After this came much kissing and hugging, and a few tears; and it was agreed that Christabel should forego her idea of six months' study of cla.s.sical music at the famous conservatoire at Leipsic.

She and Jessie had made all their plans before she spoke to her aunt; and when she informed Miss Bridgeman that she had given way to Mrs.

Tregonell's wish, and had abandoned all idea of Germany, that strong-minded young woman expressed herself most unreservedly.

"You are a fool!" she exclaimed. "No doubt that's an outrageous remark from a person in my position to an heiress like you; but I can't help it. You are a fool--a yielding, self-abnegating fool! If you stay here you will marry that man. There is no escape possible for you. Your aunt has made up her mind about it. She will worry you till you give your consent, and then you will be miserable ever afterwards."

"I shall do nothing of the kind. I wonder that you can think me so weak."

"If you are weak enough to stay, you will be weak enough to do the other thing," retorted Jessie.

"How can I go when my aunt looks at me with those sad eyes, dying eyes--they are so changed since last year--and implores me to stop? I thought you loved her, Jessie?"

"I do love her, with a fond and grateful affection. She was my first friend outside my own home; she is my benefactress. But I have to think of your welfare, Christabel--your welfare in this world and the world to come. Both will be in danger if you stay here and marry Leonard Tregonell."

"I am going to stay here; and I am not going to marry Leonard. Will that a.s.surance satisfy you? One would think I had no will of my own."

"You have not the will to withstand your aunt. She parted you and Mr.

Hamleigh; and she will marry you to her son."

"The parting was my act," said Christabel.

"It was your aunt who brought it about. Had she been true and loyal there would have been no such parting. If you had only trusted to me in that crisis, I think I might have saved you some sorrow; but what's done cannot be undone."

"There are some cases in which a woman must judge for herself,"

Christabel replied, coldly.

"A woman, yes--a woman who has had some experience of life: but not a girl, who knows nothing of the hard real world and its temptations, difficulties, struggles. Don't let us talk of it any more. I cannot trust myself to speak when I remember how shamefully he was treated."

Christabel stared in amazement. The calm, practical Miss Bridgeman spoke with a pa.s.sionate vehemence which took the girl's breath away; and yet, in her heart of hearts, Christabel was grateful to her for this sudden flash of anger.

"I did not know you liked him so much--that you were so sorry for him,"

she faltered.

"Then you ought to have known, if you ever took the trouble to remember how good he always was to me, how sympathetic, how tolerant of my company when it was forced upon him day after day, how seemingly unconscious of my plainness and dowdiness. Why there was not a present he gave me which did not show the most thoughtful study of my tastes and fancies. I never look at one of his gifts--I was not obliged to fling his offerings back in his face as you were--without wondering that a fine gentleman could be so full of small charities and delicate courtesy. He was like one of those wits and courtiers one reads of in Burnet--not spotless, like Tennyson's Arthur--but the very essence of refinement and good feeling. G.o.d bless him! wherever he is."

"You are very odd sometimes, Jessie," said Christabel, kissing her friend, "but you have a n.o.ble heart."

There was a marked change in Leonard's conduct when he and his cousin met in the drawing-room before dinner. He had been absent at luncheon, on a trout-fishing expedition; but there had been time since his return for a long conversation between him and his mother. She had told him how his sullen temper had almost driven Christabel from the house, and how she had been only induced to stay by an appeal to her affection. This evening he was all amiability, and tried to make his peace with Randie, who received his caresses with a stolid forbearance rather than with gratification. It was easier to make friends with Christabel than with the dog, for she wished to be kind to her cousin on his mother's account.

That evening the reign of domestic peace seemed to be renewed. There were no thunder-clouds in the atmosphere. Leonard strolled about the lawn with his mother and Christabel, looking at the roses, and planning where a few more choice trees might yet be added to the collection. Mrs.

Tregonell's walks now rarely went beyond this broad velvet lawn, or the shrubberies that bordered it. She drove to church on Sundays, but she had left off visiting that involved long drives, though she professed herself delighted to see her friends. She did not want the house to become dull and gloomy for Leonard. She even insisted that there should be a garden party on Christabel's twenty-first birthday; and she was delighted when some of the old friends who came to Mount Royal that day insinuated their congratulations, in a tentative manner, upon Miss Courtenay's impending engagement to her cousin.

"There is nothing definitely settled," she told Mrs. St. Aubyn, "but I have every hope that it will be so. Leonard adores her."

"And it would be a much more suitable match for her than the other,"

said Mrs. St. Aubyn, a commonplace matron of irreproachable lineage: "it would be so nice for you to have her settled near you. Would they live at Mount Royal?"

"Of course. Where else should my son live but in his father's house?"

"But it is your house."

"Do you think I should allow my life-interest in the place to stand in the way of Leonard's enjoyment of it," exclaimed Mrs. Tregonell. "I should be proud to take the second place in his house--proud to see his young wife at the head of his table."

"That is all very well in theory, but I have never seen it work out well in fact," said the Rector of Trevalga, who made a third in the little group seated on the edge of the wide lawn, where sportive youth was playing tennis, in half a dozen courts, to the enlivening strains of a military band from Bodmin barracks.

"How thoroughly happy Christabel looks," observed another friendly matron to Mrs. Tregonell, a little later in the afternoon: "she seems to have quite got over her trouble about Mr. Hamleigh."

"Yes, I hope that is forgotten," answered Mrs. Tregonell.

This garden party was an occasion of unspeakable pain to Christabel. Her aunt had insisted upon sending out the invitations. There must be some kind of festival upon her adopted daughter's coming of age. The inheritor of lands and money was a person whose twenty-first birthday could not be permitted to slip by unmarked, like any other day in the calendar.

"If we were to have no garden party this summer people would say you were broken-hearted at the sad end of last year's engagement, darling,"

said Mrs. Tregonell, when Christabel had pleaded against the contemplated a.s.sembly, "and I know your pride would revolt at that."

"Dear Auntie, my pride has been levelled to the dust, if I ever had any; it will not raise its head on account of a garden party."

Mrs. Tregonell insisted, albeit even her small share of the preparations, the mere revision of the list of guests--the discussion and acceptance of Jessie Bridgeman's arrangements--was a fatigue to the jaded mind and enfeebled body. When the day came the mistress of Mount Royal carried herself with the old air of quiet dignity which her friends knew so well. People saw that she was aged, that she had grown pale and thin and wan; and they ascribed this change in her to anxiety about her niece's engagement. There were vague ideas as to the cause of Mr. Hamleigh's dismissal--dim notions of terrible iniquities, startling revelations, occurring on the very brink of marriage. That section of county society which did not go to London knew a great deal more about the details of the story than the people who had been in town at the time and had seen Miss Courtenay and her lover almost daily. For those daughters of the soil who but rarely crossed the Tamar the story of Miss Courtenay's engagement was a social mystery of so dark a complexion that it afforded inexhaustible material for tea-table gossip. A story, of which no one seemed to know the exact details, gave wide ground for speculation, and could always be looked at from new points of view.

And now here was the same Miss Courtenay smiling upon her friends, fair and radiant, showing no traces of last year's tragedy in her looks or manners; being, indeed, one of those women who do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves for daws to peck at. The local mind, therefore, arrived at the conclusion that Miss Courtenay had consoled herself for the loss of one lover by the gain of another, and was now engaged to her cousin.

Clara St. Aubyn ventured to congratulate her upon this happy issue out of bygone griefs.