Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Aunt and niece were both crying now. However familiar the story might be, they always wept a little at this point.

  “George never knew one word of this conversation between my father and me — he never suspected our fears — but from that hour my happiness was gone. My life was one perpetual dread — one ceaseless struggle to hide all anxieties and fears under a smile. George rallied, and seemed to grow strong again — was full of energy and high spirits, and I had to pretend to think him as thoroughly recovered as he fancied himself. But by this time I had grown sadly wise. I had questioned our doctor — had looked into medical books — and I knew every sad sign and token of decay. I knew what the flushed cheek and the brilliant eye, the damp cold hand, and the short cough meant. I knew that the hand of death was on him whom I loved more than all the world besides. There was no need for the postponement of our marriage. In the long bright days of August he seemed wonderfully well — as well as he had been before the attack in May. I was almost happy; for, in spite of what the doctor had told me, I began to hope! but early in September, while the dressmakers were in the house making my wedding clothes, the end came suddenly, unexpectedly, with only a few hours’ warning. Oh, Christabel! I cannot speak of that day!”

  “No, darling, you shall not, you must not,” cried Christabel, showering kisses on her aunt’s pale cheek.

  “And yet you always lead her on to talk about Captain Hamleigh,” said the sensible voice out of the shadow. “Isn’t that just a little inconsistent of our sweet Belle?”

  “Don’t call me your ‘sweet Belle’ — as if I were a baby,” exclaimed the girl. “I know I am inconsistent — I was born foolish, and no one has ever taken the trouble to cure me of my folly. And now, Auntie dear, tell me about Captain Hamleigh’s son — the boy who is coming here to-morrow.”

  “I have not seen him since he was at Eton. The Squire drove me down on a Fourth of June to see him.”

  “It was very good of Uncle Tregonell.”

  “The Squire was always good,” replied Mrs. Tregonell, with a dignified air. Christabel’s only remembrance of her uncle was of a large loud man, who blustered and scolded a good deal, and frequently contrived, perhaps, without meaning it, to make everybody in the house uncomfortable; so she reflected inwardly upon that blessed dispensation which, however poorly wives may think of living husbands, provides that every widow should consider her departed spouse completely admirable.

  “And was he a nice boy in those days?” asked Christabel, keenly interested.

  “He was a handsome gentlemanlike lad — very intellectual looking; but I was grieved to see that he looked delicate, like his father; and his dame told me that he generally had a winter cough.”

  “Who took care of him in those days?”

  “His maternal aunt — a baronet’s wife, with a handsome house in Eaton Square. All his mother’s people were well placed in life.”

  “Poor boy! hard to have neither father nor mother. It was twelve years ago when you spent that season in London with the Squire,” said Christabel, calculating profoundly with the aid of her finger tips; “and Angus Hamleigh was then sixteen, which makes him now eight-and-twenty — dreadfully old. And since then he has been at Oxford — and he got the Newdigate — what is the Newdigate? — and he did not hunt, or drive tandem, or have rats in his rooms, or paint the doors vermilion — like — like the general run of young men,” said Christabel, reddening, and hurrying on confusedly; “and he was altogether rather a superior person at the university.”

  “He had not your cousin Leonard’s high spirits and powerful physique,” said Mrs. Tregonell, as if she were ever so slightly offended. “Young men’s tastes are so different.”

  “Yes,” sighed Christabel, “it’s lucky they are, is it not? It wouldn’t do for them all to keep rats in their rooms, would it? The poor old colleges would smell so dreadful. Well,” with another sigh, “it is just three weeks since Angus Hamleigh accepted your invitation to come here to stay, and I have been expiring of curiosity ever since. If he keeps me expiring much longer I shall be dead before he comes. And I have a dreadful foreboding that, when he does appear, I shall detest him.”

  “No fear of that,” said Miss Bridgeman, the owner of the voice that issued now and again from the covert of a deep armchair on the other side of the fireplace.

  “Why not, Mistress Oracle?” asked Christabel.

  “Because, as Mr. Hamleigh is accomplished and good-looking, and as you see very few young men of any kind, and none that are particularly attractive, the odds are fifty to one that you will fall in love with him.”

  “I am not that kind of person,” protested Christabel, drawing up her long full throat, a perfect throat, and one of the girl’s chief beauties.

  “I hope not,” said Mrs. Tregonell; “I trust that Belle has better sense than to fall in love with a young man, just because he happens to come to stay in the house.”

  Christabel was on the point of exclaiming, “Why, Auntie, you did it;” but caught herself up sharply, and cried out instead, with an air of settling the question for ever.

  “My dear Jessie, he is eight-and-twenty. Just ten years older than I am.”

  “Of course — he’s ever so much too old for her. A blasé man of the world,” said Mrs. Tregonell. “I should be deeply sorry to see my darling marry a man of that age — and with such antecedents. I should like her to marry a young man not above two or three years her senior.”

  “And fond of rats,” said Jessie Bridgeman to herself, for she had a shrewd idea that she knew the young man whose image filled Mrs. Tregonell’s mind as she spoke.

  All these words were spoken in a goodly oak-panelled room in the Manor House known as Mount Royal, on the slope of a bosky hill about a mile and a half from the little town of Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall. It was an easy matter, according to the Heralds’ Office, to show that Mount Royal had belonged to the Tregonells in the days of the Norman kings; for the Tregonells traced their descent, by a female branch, from the ancient baronial family of Botterell or Bottreaux, who once held a kind of Court in their castle on Mount Royal, had their dungeons and their prisoners, and, in the words of Carew, “exercised some large jurisdiction.” Of the ancient castle hardly a stone remained; but the house in which Mrs. Tregonell lived was as old as the reign of James the First, and had all the rich and quaint beauty of that delightful period in architecture. Nor was there any prettier room at Mount Royal than this spacious oak-panelled parlour, with curious nooks and cupboards, a recessed fireplace, or “cosy-corner,” with a small window on each side of the chimney-breast, and one particular alcove placed at an angle of the house, overlooking one of the most glorious views in England. It might be hyperbole perhaps to call those Cornish hills mountains, yet assuredly it was a mountain landscape over which the eye roved as it looked from the windows of Mount Royal; for those wide sweeps of hill side, those deep clefts and gorges, and heathery slopes, on which the dark red cattle grazed in silent peacefulness, and the rocky bed of the narrow river that went rushing through the deep valley, had all the grandeur of the Scottish Highlands, all the pastoral beauty of Switzerland. And away to the right, beyond the wild and indented coast-line, that horned coast which is said to have given its name to Cornwall — Cornu-Wales — stretched the Atlantic.

  The room had that quaint charm peculiar to rooms occupied by many generations, and upon which each age as it went by has left its mark. It was a room full of anachronisms. There was some of the good old Jacobean furniture left in it, while spindle-legged Chippendale tables and luxurious nineteenth-century chairs and sofas agreeably contrasted with those heavy oak cabinets and corner cupboards. Here an old Indian screen or a china monster suggested a fashionable auction room, filled with ladies who wore patches and played ombre, and squabbled for ideal ugliness in Oriental pottery; there a delicately carved cherry-wood prie-dieu, with claw feet, recalled the earlier beauties of the Stuart Court. Time had faded the stamped velvet curtai
ns to that neutral withered-leaf hue which painters love in a background, and against which bright yellow chrysanthemums and white asters in dark red and blue Japanese bowls, seen dimly in the fitful fire-glow, made patches of light and colour.

  The girl kneeling by the matron’s chair, looking dreamily into the fire, was even fairer than her surroundings. She was thoroughly English in her beauty, features not altogether perfect, but complexion of that dazzling fairness and wild-rose bloom which is in itself enough for loveliness; a complexion so delicate as to betray every feeling of the sensitive mind, and to vary with every shade of emotion. Her eyes were blue, clear as summer skies, and with an expression of childlike innocence — that look which tells of a soul whose purity has never been tarnished by the knowledge of evil. That frank clear outlook was natural in a girl brought up as Christabel Courtenay had been at a good woman’s knee, shut in and sheltered from the rough world, reared in the love and fear of God, shaping every thought of her life by the teaching of the Gospel.

  She had been an orphan at nine years old, and had parted for ever from mother and father before her fifth birthday, Mrs. Courtenay leaving her only child in her sister’s care, and going out to India to join her husband, one of the Sudder Judges. Husband and wife died of cholera in the fourth year of Mrs. Courtenay’s residence at Calcutta, leaving Christabel in her aunt’s care.

  Mr. Courtenay was a man of ample means, and his wife, daughter and co-heiress with Mrs. Tregonell of Ralph Champernowne, had a handsome dowry, so Christabel might fairly rank as an heiress. On her grandfather’s death she inherited half of the Champernowne estate, which was not entailed. But she had hardly ever given a thought to her financial position. She knew that she was a ward in Chancery, and that Mrs. Tregonell was her guardian and adopted mother, that she had always as much money as she wanted, and never experienced the pain of seeing poverty which she could not relieve in some measure from her well-supplied purse. The general opinion in the neighbourhood of Mount Royal was that the Indian Judge had accumulated an immense fortune during his twenty years’ labour as a civil servant; but this notion was founded rather upon vague ideas about Warren Hastings and the Pagoda tree, and the supposed inability of any Indian official to refuse a bribe, than on plain facts or personal knowledge.

  Mrs. Tregonell had been left a widow at thirty-five years of age, a widow with one son whom she idolized, but who was not a source of peace and happiness. He was open-handed, had no petty vices, and was supposed to possess a noble heart — a fact which Christabel was sometimes inclined to doubt when she saw his delight in the slaughter of birds and beasts, not having in her own nature that sportsman’s instinct which can excuse such murder. He was not the kind of lad who would wilfully set his foot upon a worm, but he had no thrill of tenderness or remorseful pity as he looked at the glazing eye, or felt against his hand the last feeble heart-beats of snipe or woodcock. He was a troublesome boy — fond of inferior company, and loving rather to be first fiddle in the saddle-room than to mind his manners in his mother’s pink-and-white panelled saloon — among the best people in the neighbourhood. He was lavish to recklessness in the use of money, and therefore was always furnished with followers and flatterers. His University career had been altogether a failure and a disgrace. He had taken no degree — had made himself notorious for those rough pranks which have not even the merit of being original — the traditionary college misdemeanours handed down from generation to generation of undergraduates, and which by their blatant folly incline the outside world to vote for the suppression of Universities and the extinction of the undergraduate race.

  His mother had known and suffered all this, yet still loved her boy with a fond excusing love — ever ready to pardon — ever eager to believe that these faults and follies were but the crop of wild oats which must needs precede the ripe and rich harvest of manhood. Such wild youths, she told herself, fatuously, generally make the best men. Leonard would mend his ways before he was five-and-twenty, and would become interested in his estate, and develop into a model Squire, like his admirable father.

  That he had no love for scholarship mattered little — a country gentleman, with half a dozen manors to look after, could be but little advantaged by a familiar acquaintance with the integral calculus, or a nice appreciation of the Greek tragedians. When Leonard Tregonell and the college Dons were mutually disgusted with each other to a point that made any further residence at Oxford impossible, the young man graciously announced his intention of making a tour round the world, for the benefit of his health, somewhat impaired by University dissipations, and the widening of his experience in the agricultural line.

  “Farming has been reduced to a science,” he told his mother; “I want to see how it works in our colonies. I mean to make a good many reformations in the management of my farms and the conduct of my tenants when I come home.”

  At first loth to part with him, very fearful of letting him so far out of her ken, Mrs. Tregonell ultimately allowed herself to be persuaded that sea voyages and knocking about in strange lands would be the making of her son; and there was no sacrifice, no loss of comfort and delight, which she would not have endured for his benefit. She spent many sad hours in prayer, or on her knees before her open Bible; and at last it seemed to her that her friends and neighbours must be right, and that it would be for Leonard’s good to go. If he stayed in England she could not hope to keep him always in Cornwall. He could go to London, and, no doubt, London vices would be worse than Oxford vices. Yes, it was good for him to go; she thought of Esau, and how, after a foolish and ill-governed youth, the son who had bartered his father’s blessing, yet became an estimable member of society. Why should not her boy flourish as Esau had flourished? but never without the parental blessing. That would be his to the end. He could not sin beyond her large capacity for pardon: he could not exhaust an inexhaustible love. So Leonard, who had suddenly found that wild Cornish coast, and even the long rollers of the Atlantic contemptibly insignificant as compared with the imagined magnitude of Australian downs, and the grandeurs of Botany Bay, hurried on the preparations for his departure, provided himself with everything expensive in gunnery, fishing-tackle, porpoise-hide thigh-boots, and waterproof gear of every kind, and departed rejoicing in the most admirably appointed Australian steamer. The family doctor, who was one of the many friends in favour of this tour, had strongly recommended the rough-and-tumble life of a sailing-vessel; but Leonard preferred the luxury and swiftness of a steamer, and, suggesting to his mother that a sailing-vessel always took out emigrants, from whom it was more than likely he would catch scarlet-fever or small-pox, instantly brought Mrs. Tregonell to perceive that a steamer which carried no second-class passengers was the only fitting conveyance for her son.

  He was gone — and, while the widow grieved in submissive silence, telling herself that it was God’s will that she and her son should be parted, and that whatever was good for him should be well for her, Christabel and the rest of the household inwardly rejoiced at his absence. Nobody openly owned to being happier without him; but the knowledge that he was far away brought a sense of relief to every one; even to the old servants, who had been so fond of him in his childhood, when the kitchen and servants’ hall had ever been a happy hunting-ground for him in periods of banishment from the drawing-room.

  “It is no good for me to punish him,” Mrs. Tregonell had remonstrated, with assumed displeasure; “you all make so much of him.”

  “Oh, ma’am, he is such a fine, high-spirited boy,” the cook would reply on these occasions; “‘tesn’t possible to be angry with him. He has such a spirit.”

  “Such a spirit” was only a euphemism for such a temper; and, as years went on, Mr. Tregonell’s visits to the kitchen and servants’ hall came to be less appreciated by his retainers. He no longer went there to be petted — to run riot in boyish liveliness, upsetting the housemaids’ work-boxes, or making toffy under the cook’s directions. As he became aware of his own importance, he speedily deve
loped into a juvenile tyrant; he became haughty and overbearing, hectored and swore, befouled the snowy floors and flags with his muddy shooting-boots, made havoc and work wherever he went. The household treated him with unfailing respect, as their late master’s son, and their own master, possibly, in the future; but their service was no longer the service of love. His loud strong voice, shouting in the passages and lobbies, scared the maids at their tea. Grooms and stable-boys liked him; for with them he was always familiar, and often friendly. He and they had tastes and occupations in common; but to the women servants and the grave middle-aged butler his presence was a source of discomfort.

  Next to her son in Mrs. Tregonell’s affection stood her niece Christabel. That her love for the girl who had never given her a moment’s pain should be a lesser love than that which she bore to the boy who had seldom given her an hour’s unalloyed pleasure was one of the anomalies common in the lives of good women. To love blindly and unreasonably is as natural to a woman as it is to love: and happy she whose passionate soul finds its idol in husband or child, instead of being lured astray by strange lights outside the safe harbour of home. Mrs. Tregonell loved her niece very dearly; but it was with that calm, comfortable affection which mothers are apt to feel for the child who has never given them any trouble. Christabel had been her pupil: all that the girl knew had been learned from Mrs. Tregonell; and, though her education fell far short of the requirements of Girton or Harley Street, there were few girls whose intellectual powers had been more fully awakened, without the taint of pedantry. Christabel loved books, but they were the books her aunt had chosen for her — old-fashioned books for the most part. She loved music, but was no brilliant pianist, for when Mrs. Tregonell, who had taught her carefully up to a certain point, suggested a course of lessons from a German professor at Plymouth, the girl recoiled from the idea of being taught by a stranger.