Mount Royal Volume I Part 9

This being settled, Mrs. Tregonell wrote at once to her agent, with instructions to set the old house in Bolton Row in order for the season immediately after Easter, and Christabel and her lover had to reconcile their minds to the idea of a long dreary winter of severance.

Miss Courtenay had grown curiously grave and thoughtful since her engagement--a change which Jessie, who watched her closely, observed with some surprise. It seemed as if she had pa.s.sed from girlhood into womanhood in the hour in which she pledged herself to Angus Hamleigh.

She had for ever done with the thoughtless gaiety of youth that knows not care. She had taken upon herself the burden of an anxious, self-sacrificing love. To no one had she spoken of her lover's precarious hold upon life; but the thought of by how frail a tenure she held her happiness was ever present with her. "How can I be good enough to him?--how can I do enough to make his life happy?" she thought, "when it may be for so short a time."

With this ever-present consciousness of a fatal future, went the desire to make her lover forget his doom, and the ardent hope that the sentence might be revoked--that the doom p.r.o.nounced by human judgment might yet be reversed. Indeed, Angus had himself begun to make light of his malady. Who could tell that the famous physician was not a false prophet, after all? The same dire announcement of untimely death had been made to Leigh Hunt, who contrived somehow--not always in the smoothest waters--to steer his frail bark into the haven of old age.

Angus spoke of this, hopefully, to Christabel, as they loitered within the roofless crumbling walls of the ancient oratory above St. Nectan's Kieve, one sunny November morning, Miss Bridgeman rambling on the crest of the hill, with the black sheep-dog, Randie, under the polite fiction of blackberry hunting, among hedges which had long been shorn of their last berry, though the freshness of the lichens and ferns still lingered in this sheltered nook.

"Yes, I know that cruel doctor was mistaken!" said Christabel, her lips quivering a little, her eyes wide and grave, but tearless, as they gazed at her lover. "I know it, I know it!"

"I know that I am twice as strong and well as I was when he saw me,"

answered Angus; "you have worked as great a miracle for me as ever was wrought at the grave of St. Mertheriana in Minster Churchyard. You have made me happy, and what can cure a man better than perfect bliss. But, oh, my darling! what is to become of me when I leave you, when I return to the beaten ways of London life, and, looking back at these delicious days, ask myself if this sweet life with you is not some dream which I have dreamed, and which can never come again?"

"You will not think anything of the kind," said Christabel, with a pretty little air of authority which charmed him--as all her looks and ways charmed him. "You know that I am sober reality, and that our lives are to be spent together. And you are not going back to London--at least not to stop there. You are going to the South of France."

"Indeed? this is the first I have heard of any such intention."

"Did not that doctor say you were to winter in the South?"

"He did. But I thought we had agreed to despise that doctor?"

"We will despise him, yet be warned by him. Why should any one, who has liberty and plenty of money, spend his winter in a smoky city, where the fog blinds and stifles him, and the frost pinches him, and the damp makes him miserable, when he can have blue skies, and sunshine and flowers, and ever so much brighter stars, a few hundred miles away? We are bound to obey each other, are we not, Angus? Is not that among our marriage vows?"

"I believe there is something about obedience--on the lady's side--but I waive that technicality. I am prepared to become an awful example of a henpecked husband. If you say I am to go southward, with the swallows, I will go--yea, verily, to Algeria or Tunis, if you insist: though I would rather be on the Riviera, whence a telegram, with the single word 'Come'

would bring me to your side in forty-eight hours."

"Yes, you will go to that lovely land on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and there you will be very careful of your health, so that when we meet in London, after Easter, your every look will gainsay that pitiless doctor. Will you do this, for my sake, Angus?" she pleaded, lovingly, nestling at his side, as they stood together on a narrow path that wound down to the entrance of the Kieve. They could hear the rush of the waterfall in the deep green hollow below them, and the faint flutter of loosely hanging leaves, stirred lightly by the light wind, and far away the joyous bark of a sheep-dog. No human voices, save their own, disturbed the autumnal stillness.

"This, and much more, would I do to please you, love. Indeed, if I am not to be here, I might just as well be in the South; nay, much better than in London, or Paris, both of which cities I know by heart. But don't you think we could make a compromise, and that I might spend the winter at Torquay, running over to Mount Royal for a few days occasionally?"

"No; Torquay will not do, delightful as it would be to have you so near.

I have been reading about the climate in the South of France, and I am sure, if you are careful, a winter there will do you worlds of good.

Next year----"

"Next year we can go there together, and you will take care of me. Was that what you were going to say, Belle?"

"Something like that."

"Yes" he said, slowly, after a thoughtful pause, "I shall be glad to be away from London, and all old a.s.sociations. My past life is a worthless husk that I have done with for ever."

CHAPTER VI.

IN SOCIETY.

The Easter recess was over. Society had returned from its brief holiday--its glimpse of budding hedges and primrose-dotted banks, blue skies and blue violets, the snowy bloom of orchards, the tender green of young cornfields. Society had come back again, and was hard at the London treadmill--yawning at old operas, and d.a.m.ning new plays--sn.i.g.g.e.ring at crowded soirees--laying down the law, each man his particular branch thereof, at carefully planned dinner parties--quarrelling and making friends again--eating and drinking--spending and wasting, and pretending to care very little about anything; for society is as salt that has lost its savour if it is not cynical and affected.

But there was one _debutante_ at least that season for whom town pleasures had lost none of their freshness, for whom the old operas were all melody, and the new plays all wit--who admired everything with frankest wonder and enthusiasm, and without a thought of Horace, or Pope, or Creech, or anybody, except the lover who was always at her side, and who shed the rose-coloured light of happiness upon the commonest things. To sit in the Green Park on a mild April morning, to see the guard turn out by St. James's Palace after breakfast, to loiter away an hour or two at a picture gallery--was to be infinitely happy.

Neither opera nor play, dinner nor dance, race-course nor flower-show, was needed to complete the sum of Christabel's bliss when Angus Hamleigh was with her.

He had returned from Hyeres, quietest among the southern towns, wonderfully improved in health and strength. Even Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman perceived the change in him.

"I think you must have been very ill when you came to Mount Royal, Mr.

Hamleigh," said Jessie, one day. "You look so much better now."

"My life was empty then--it is full now," he answered. "It is hope that keeps a man alive, and I had very little to hope for when I went westward. How strange the road of life is, and how little a man knows what is waiting for him round the corner."

The house in Bolton Row was charming; just large enough to be convenient, just small enough to be snug. At the back, the windows looked into Lord Somebody's garden--not quite a tropical paradise--nay, even somewhat flavoured with bricks and mortar--but still a garden, where, by sedulous art, the gardeners kept alive ferns and flowers, and where trees, warranted to resist smoke, put forth young leaves in the springtime, and only languished and sickened in untimely decay when the London season was over, and their function as fashionable trees had been fulfilled.

The house was furnished in a Georgian style, pleasant to modern taste.

The drawing-room was of the spindle-legged order--satin-wood card tables; groups of miniatures in oval frames; j.a.panese folding screen, behind which Belinda might have played Bo-peep; china jars, at whose fall Narcissa might have inly suffered, while outwardly serene. The dining-room was sombre and substantial. The bedrooms had been improved by modern upholstery; for the sleeping apartments of our ancestors leave a good deal to be desired. All the windows were full of flowers--inside and out there was the perfume and colour of many blossoms. The three drawing-rooms, growing smaller to a diminishing point, like a practical lesson in perspective, were altogether charming.

Major Bree had escorted the ladies to London, and was their constant guest, camping out in a bachelor lodging in Jermyn Street, and coming across Piccadilly every day to eat his luncheon in Bolton Row, and to discuss the evening's engagements.

Long as he had been away from London, he acclimatized himself very quickly--found out everything about everybody--what singers were best worth hearing--what plays best worth seeing--what actors should be praised--which pictures should be looked at and talked about--what horses were likely to win the notable races. He was a walking guide, a living hand-book to fashionable London.

All Mrs. Tregonell's old friends--all the Cornish people who came to London--called in Bolton Row; and at every house where the lady and her niece visited there were new introductions, whereby the widow's visiting list widened like a circle in the water--and cards for dances and evening parties, afternoons and dinners were super-abundant. Christabel wanted to see everything. She had quite a country girl's taste, and cared much more for the theatre and the opera than to be dressed in a new gown, and to be crushed in a crowd of other young women in new gowns--or to sit still and be admired at a stately dinner. Nor was she particularly interested in the leaders of fashion, their ways and manners--the newest professed or professional beauty--the last social scandal. She wanted to see the great city of which she had read in history--the Tower, the Savoy, Westminster Hall, the Abbey, St. Paul's, the Temple--the London of Elizabeth, the still older London of the Edwards and Henries, the house in which Milton was born, the organ on which he played, the place where Shakespeare's Theatre once stood, the old Inn whence Chaucer's Pilgrims started on their journey. Even d.i.c.kens's London--the London of Pickwick and Winkle--the Saracen's Head at which Mr. Squeers put up--had charms for her.

"Is everything gone?" she asked, piteously, after being told how improvement had effaced the brick and mortar background of English History.

Yet there still remained enough to fill her mind with solemn thoughts of the past. She spent long hours in the Abbey, with Angus and Jessie, looking at the monuments, and recalling the lives and deeds of long vanished heroes and statesmen. The Tower, and the old Inns of Court, were full of interest. Her curiosity about old houses and streets was insatiable.

"No one less than Macaulay could satisfy you," said Angus, one day, when his memory was at fault. "A man of infinite reading, and infallible memory."

"But you have read so much, and you remember a great deal."

They had been prowling about the Whitehall end of the town in the bright early morning, before Fashion had begun to stir herself faintly among her down pillows. Christabel loved the parks and streets while the freshness of sunrise was still upon them--and these early walks were an inst.i.tution.

"Where is the Decoy?" she asked Angus, one day, in St. James's Park; and on being interrogated, it appeared that she meant a certain piece of water, described in "Peveril of the Peak." All this part of London was peopled with Scott's heroes and heroines, or with suggestions of Goldsmith. Here Fenella danced before good-natured, loose-living Rowley.

Here Nigel stood aside, amidst the crowd, to see Charles, Prince of Wales, and his ill-fated favourite, Buckingham, go by. Here the Citizen of the World met Beau Tibbs and the gentleman in black. For Christabel, the Park was like a scene in a stage play.

Then, after breakfast, there were long drives into fair suburban haunts, where they escaped in some degree from London smoke and London restraints of all kinds, where they could charter a boat, and row up the river to a still fairer scene, and picnic in some rushy creek, out of ken of society, and be almost as recklessly gay as if they had been at Tintagel.

These were the days Angus loved best. The days upon which he and his betrothed turned their backs upon London society, and seemed as far away from the outside world as ever they had been upon the wild western coast. Like most men educated at Eton and Oxford, and brought up in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, Angus loved the Thames with a love that was almost a pa.s.sion.

"It is my native country," he said; "I have no other. All the pleasantest a.s.sociations of my boyhood and youth are interwoven with the river. When I die, my spirit ought to haunt these sh.o.r.es, like that ghost of the 'Scholar Gipsy,' which you have read about in Arnold's poem."

He knew every bend and reach of the river--every tributary, creek, and cyot--almost every row of pollard willows, standing stunted and grim along the bank, like a line of rugged old men. He knew where the lilies grew, and where there were chances of trout. The haunts of monster pike were familiar to him--indeed, he declared that he knew many of these gentlemen personally--that they were as old as the Fontainebleau carp, and bore a charmed life.

"When I was at Eton I knew them all by sight," he said. "There was one which I set my heart upon landing, but he was ever so much stronger and cleverer than I. If I had caught him I should have worn his skin ever after, in the pride of my heart--like Hercules with his lion. But he still inhabits the same creek, still sulks among the same rushes, and devours the gentler members of the finny race by shoals. We christened him Dr. Parr, for we knew he was preternaturally old, and we thought he must, from mere force of a.s.sociation, be a profound scholar."

Mr. Hamleigh was always finding reasons for these country excursions, which he declared were the one sovereign antidote for the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms, and the evil effects of late hours.

"You wouldn't like to see Christabel fade and languish like the flowers in your drawing-room," he urged, when Mrs. Tregonell wanted her niece to make a round of London visits, instead of going down to Maidenhead on the coach, to lunch somewhere up the river. Not at Skindle's--or at any other hotel--but in the lazy sultry quiet of some sequestered nook below the hanging woods of Clieveden. "I'm sure you can spare her just for to-day--such a perfect spring day. It would be a crime to waste such sunlight and such balmy air in town drawing-rooms. Could not you strain a point, dear Mrs. Tregonell, and come with us?"

Aunt Diana shook her head. No, the fatigue would be too much--she had lived such a quiet life at Mount Royal, that a very little exertion tired her. Besides she had some calls to make; and then there was a dinner at Lady Bulteel's, to which she must take Christabel, and an evening party afterwards.