“What is Pentargon, that they put up its name in such big letters?” asked Mr. Hamleigh, staring at the board. “Is it a borough town — or a cattle market — or a cathedral city — or what? They seem tremendously proud of it.”
“It is nothing — or only a shallow bay, with a waterfall and a wonderful cave, which I am always longing to explore. I believe it is nearly as beautiful as the cavern in Shelley’s ‘Alastor.’ But you will see what Pentargon is like in less than five minutes.”
They crossed a ploughed field, and then, by a big five-barred gate, entered the magic region which was said to be the paradise of seals. A narrow walk cut in a steep and rocky bank, where the gorse and heather grew luxuriantly above slate and spar, described a shallow semicircle round one of the loveliest bays in the world — a spot so exquisitely tranquil in this calm autumn weather, so guarded and fenced in by the massive headlands that jutted out towards the main — a peaceful haven, seemingly so remote from that outer world to which belonged yonder white-winged ship on the verge of the blue — that Angus Hamleigh exclaimed involuntarily, —
“Here is peace! Surely this must be a bay in that Lotus land which Tennyson has painted for us!”
Hitherto their conversation had been desultory — mere fragmentary talk about the landscape and the loveliness of the autumn day, with its clear bright sky and soft west wind. They had been always in motion, and there had been a certain adventurousness in the way that seemed to give occupation to their thoughts. But now Mr. Hamleigh came to a dead stop, and stood looking at the rugged amphitheatre, and the low weedy rocks washed smooth by the sea.
“Would you mind sitting down for a few minutes?” he asked; “this Pentargon of yours is a lovely spot, and I don’t want to leave it instantly. I have a very slow appreciation of Nature. It takes me a long time to grasp her beauties.”
Christabel seated herself on the bank which he had selected for her accommodation, and Mr. Hamleigh placed himself a little lower, almost at her feet, her face turned seaward, his half towards her, as if that lily face, with its wild rose bloom, were even lovelier than the sunlit ocean in all its variety of colour.
“It is a delicious spot,” said Angus, “I wonder whether Tristan and Iseult ever came here! I can fancy the queen stealing away from the Court and Court foolery, and walking across the sunlit hills with her lover. It would be rather a long walk, and there might be a difficulty about getting back in time for supper; but one can picture them wandering by flowery fields, or by the cliffs above that everlasting sea, and coming here to rest and talk of their sorrow and their love. Can you not fancy her as Matthew Arnold paints her? —
“Let her have her youth again — Let her be as she was then! Let her have her proud dark eyes, And her petulant, quick replies: Let her sweep her dazzling hand, With its gesture of command, And shake back her raven hair With the old imperious air.
I have an idea that the Hibernian Iseult must have been a tartar, though Matthew Arnold glosses over her peccadilloes so pleasantly. I wonder whether she had a strong brogue, and a sneaking fondness for usquebaugh.”
“Please, don’t make a joke of her,” pleaded Christabel; “she is very real to me. I see her as a lovely lady — tall and royal-looking, dressed in long robes of flowered silk, fringed with gold. And Tristan — —”
“What of Tristan? Is his image as clear in your mind? How do you depict the doomed knight, born to suffer and to sin, destined to sorrow from the time of his forest-birth — motherless, beset with enemies, consumed by hopeless passion. I hope you feel sorry for Tristan?”
“Who could help being sorry for him?”
“Albeit he was a sinner? I assure you, in the old romance which you have not read — which you would hardly care to read — neither Tristan nor Iseult are spotless.”
“I have never thought of their wrong-doing. Their fate was so sad, and they loved each other so truly.”
“And, again, you can believe, perhaps — you who are so innocent and confiding — that a man who has sinned may forsake the old evil ways and lead a good life, until every stain of that bygone sin is purified. You can believe, as the Greeks believed, in atonement and purification.”
“I believe, as I hope all Christians do, that repentance can wash away sin.”
“Even the accusing memory of wrong-doing, and make a man’s soul white and fair again? That is a beautiful creed.”
“I think the Gospel gives us warrant for believing as much — not as some of the Dissenters teach, that one effort of faith, an hour of prayer and ejaculation, can transform a murderer into a saint; but that earnest, sustained regret for wrong-doing, and a steady determination to live a better life — —”
“Yes — that is real repentance,” exclaimed Angus, interrupting her. “Common sense, even without Gospel light, tells one that it must be good. Christabel — may I call you Christabel? — just for this one isolated half-hour of life — here in Pentargon Bay? You shall be Miss Courtenay directly we leave this spot.”
“Call me what you please. I don’t think it matters very much,” faltered Christabel, blushing deeply.
“But it makes all the difference to me. Christabel, I can’t tell you how sweet it is to me just to pronounce your name. If — if — I could call you by that name always, or by a name still nearer and dearer. But you must judge. Give me half-an-hour — half-an-hour of heartfelt earnest truth on my side, and pitying patience on yours. Christabel, my past life has not been what a stainless Christian would call a good life. I have not been so bad as Tristan. I have violated no sacred charge — betrayed no kinsman. I suppose I have been hardly worse than the common run of young men, who have the means of leading an utterly useless life. I have lived selfishly, unthinkingly — caring for my own pleasure — with little thought of anything that was to come afterwards, either on earth or in heaven. But all that is past and done with. My wild oats are sown; I have had enough of youth and folly. When I came to Cornwall the other day I thought that I was on the threshold of middle age, and that middle age could give me nothing but a few years of pain and weariness. But — behold a miracle! — you have given me back my youth — youth and hope, and a desire for length of days, and a passionate yearning to lead a new, bright, stainless life. You have done all this, Christabel. I love you as I never thought it possible to love! I believe in you as I never before believed in woman — and yet — and yet — —”
He paused, with a long heartbroken sigh, clasped the girl’s hand, which had been straying idly among the faded heather, and pressed it to his lips.
“And yet I dare not ask you to be my wife. Shall I tell you why?”
“Yes, tell me,” she faltered, her cheeks deadly pale, her lowered eyelids heavy with tears.
“I told you I was like Achilles, doomed to an early death. You remember with what pathetic tenderness Thetis speaks of her son,
‘Few years are thine, and not a lengthened term; At once to early death and sorrows doomed Beyond the lot of man!’
The Fates have spoken about me quite as plainly as ever the sea-nymph foretold the doom of her son. He was given the choice of length of days or glory, and he deemed fame better than long life. But my life has been as inglorious as it must be brief. Three months ago, one of the wisest of physicians pronounced my doom. The hereditary malady which for the last fifty years has been the curse of my family shows itself by the clearest indications in my case. I could have told the doctor this just as well as he told me; but it is best to have official information. I may die before I am a year older; I may crawl on for the next ten years — a fragile hot-house plant, sent to winter under southern skies.”
“And you may recover, and be strong and well again!” cried Christabel, in a voice choked with sobs. She made no pretence of hiding her pity or her love. “Who can tell? God is so good. What prayer will He not grant us if we only believe in Him? Faith will remove mountains.”
“I have never seen it done,” said Angus. “I’m afraid that no effort of fait
h in this degenerate age will give a man a new lung. No, Christabel, there is no chance of long life for me. If hope — if love could give length of days, my new hopes, born of you — my new love felt for you, might work that miracle. But I am the child of my century: I only believe in the possible. And knowing that my years are so few, and that during that poor remnant of life I may be a chronic invalid, how can I — how dare I be so selfish as to ask any girl — young, fresh, and bright, with all the joys of life untasted — to be the companion of my decline? The better she loved me, the sadder would be her life — the keener would be the anguish of watching my decay!”
“But it would be a life spent with you, her days would be devoted to you; if she really loved you, she would not hesitate,” pursued Christabel, her hands clasped passionately, tears streaming down her pale cheeks, for this moment to her was the supreme crisis of fate. “She would be unhappy, but there would be sweetness even in her sorrow if she could believe that she was a comfort to you!”
“Christabel, don’t tempt me! Ah, my darling! you don’t know how selfish a man’s love is, how sweet it would be to me to snatch such bliss, even on the brink of the dark gulf — on the threshold of the eternal night, the eternal silence! Consider what you would take upon yourself — you who perhaps have never known what sickness means — have never seen the horrors of mortal disease.”
“Yes, I have sat with some of our poor people when they were dying. I have seen how painful disease is, how cruel Nature seems, and how hard it is for a poor creature racked with pain to believe in God’s beneficence; but even then there has been comfort in being able to help them and cheer them a little. I have thought more of that than of the actual misery of the scene.”
“But to give all your young life — all your days and thoughts and hopes to a doomed man! Think of that, Christabel! When you are happy with him to see Death grinning behind his shoulder — to watch that spectacle which is of all Nature’s miseries the most awful — the slow decay of human life — a man dying by inches — not death, but dissolution! If my malady were heart-disease, and you knew that at some moment — undreamt of — unlooked for — death would come, swift as an arrow from Hecate’s bow, brief, with no loathsome or revolting detail — then I might say, ‘Let us spend my remnant of life together.’ But consumption, you cannot tell what a painful ending that is! Poets and novelists have described it as a kind of euthanasia; but the poetical mind is rarely strong in scientific knowledge. I want you to understand all the horror of a life spent with a chronic sufferer, about whom the cleverest physician in London has made up his mind.”
“Answer me one question,” said Christabel, drying her tears, and trying to steady her voice. “Would your life be any happier if we were together — till the end?”
“Happier? It would be a life spent in Paradise. Pain and sickness could hardly touch me with their sting.”
“Then let me be your wife.”
“Christabel, are you in earnest? have you considered?”
“I consider nothing, except that it may be in my power to make your life a little happier than it would be without me. I want only to be sure of that. If the doom were more dreadful than it is — if there were but a few short months of life left for you, I would ask you to let me share them; I would ask to nurse you and watch you in sickness. There would be no other fate on earth so full of sweetness for me. Yes, even with death and everlasting mourning waiting for me at the end.”
“My Christabel, my beloved! my angel, my comforter! I begin to believe in miracles. I almost feel as if you could give me length of years, as well as bliss beyond all thought or hope of mine. Christabel, Christabel, God forgive me if I am asking you to wed sorrow; but you have made this hour of my life an unspeakable ecstasy. Yet I will not take you quite at your word, love. You shall have time to consider what you are going to do — time to talk to your aunt.”
“I want no time for consideration. I will be guided by no one. I think God meant me to love you — and cure you.”
“I will believe anything you say; yes, even if you promise me a new lung. God bless you, my beloved! You belong to those whom He does everlastingly bless, who are so angelic upon this earth that they teach us to believe in heaven. My Christabel, my own! I promised to call you Miss Courtenay when we left Pentargon, but I suppose now you are to be Christabel for the rest of my life!”
“Yes, always.”
“And all this time we have not seen a single seal,” exclaimed Angus, gaily.
His delicate features were radiant with happiness. Who could at such a moment remember death and doom? All painful words which need be said had been spoken.
CHAPTER V.
“THE SILVER ANSWER RANG,—’NOT DEATH, BUT LOVE’”
Mrs. Tregonell and her niece were alone together in the library half-an-hour before afternoon tea, when the autumn light was just beginning to fade, and the autumn mist to rise ghostlike from the narrow little harbour of Boscastle. Miss Bridgeman had contrived that it should be so, just as she had contrived the visit to the seals that morning.
So Christabel, kneeling by her aunt’s chair in the fire-glow, just as she had knelt upon the night before Mr. Hamleigh’s coming, with faltering lips confessed her secret.
“My dearest, I have known it for ever so long,” answered Mrs. Tregonell, gravely, laying her slender hand, sparkling with hereditary rings — never so gorgeous as the gems bought yesterday — on the girl’s sunny hair. “I cannot say that I am glad. No, Christabel, I am selfish enough to be sorry, for Leonard’s sake, that this should have happened. It was the dream of my life that you two should marry.”
“Dear aunt, we could never have cared for each other — as lovers. We had been too much like brother and sister.”
“Not too much for Leonard to love you, as I know he does. He was too confident — too secure of his power to win you. And I, his mother, have brought a rival here — a rival who has stolen your love from my son.”
“Don’t speak of him bitterly, dearest. Remember he is the son of the man you loved.”
“But not my son! Leonard must always be first in my mind. I like Angus Hamleigh. He is all that his father was — yes — it is almost a painful likeness — painful to me, who loved and mourned his father. But I cannot help being sorry for Leonard.”
“Leonard shall be my dear brother, always,” said Christabel; yet even while she spoke it occurred to her that Leonard was not quite the kind of person to accept the fraternal position pleasantly, or, indeed, any secondary character whatever in the drama of life.
“And when are you to be married?” asked Mrs. Tregonell, looking at the fire.
“Oh, Auntie, do you suppose I have begun to think of that yet awhile?”
“Be sure that he has, if you have not! I hope he is not going to be in a hurry. You were only nineteen last birthday.”
“I feel tremendously old,” said Christabel. “We — we were talking a little about the future, this afternoon, in the billiard-room, and Angus talked about the wedding being at the beginning of the new year. But I told him I was sure you would not like that.”
“No, indeed! I must have time to get reconciled to my loss,” answered the dowager, with her arm drawn caressingly round Christabel’s head, as the girl leaned against her aunt’s chair. “What will this house seem to me without my daughter? Leonard far away, putting his life in peril for some foolish sport, and you living — Heaven knows where; for you would have to study your husband’s taste, not mine, in the matter.”
“Why shouldn’t we live near you? Mr. Hamleigh might buy a place. There is generally something to be had if one watches one’s opportunity.”
“Do you think he would care to sink his fortune, or any part of it, in a Cornish estate, or to live amidst these wild hills?”
“He says he adores this place.”
“He is in love, and would swear as much of a worse place. No, Belle, I am not foolish enough to suppose that you and Mr. Hamleigh are to settle for l
ife at the end of the world. This house shall be your home whenever you choose to occupy it; and I hope you will come and stay with me sometimes, for I shall be very lonely without you.”
“Dear Auntie, you know how I love you; you know how completely happy I have been with you — how impossible it is that anything can ever lessen my love.”
“I believe that, dear girl; but it is rarely now-a-days that Ruth follows Naomi. Our modern Ruths go where their lovers go, and worship the same gods. But I don’t want to be selfish or unjust, dear. I will try to rejoice in your happiness. And if Angus Hamleigh will only be a little patient; if he will give me time to grow used to the loss of you, he shall have you with your adopted mother’s blessing.”
“He shall not have me without it,” said Christabel, looking up at her aunt with steadfast eyes.
She had said no word of that early doom of which Angus had told her. For worlds she could not have revealed that fatal truth. She had tried to put away every thought of it while she talked with her aunt. Angus had urged her beforehand to be perfectly frank, to tell Mrs. Tregonell what a mere wreck of a life it was which her lover offered her: but she had refused.
“Let that be our secret,” she said, in her low sweet voice. “We want no one’s pity. We will bear our sorrow together. And, oh, Angus! my faith is so strong. God, who has made me so happy by the gift of your love, will not take you from me. If — if your life is to be brief, mine will not be long.”
“My dearest! if the gods will it so, we will know no parting, but be translated into some new kind of life together — a modern Baucis and Philemon. I think it would be wiser — better, to tell your aunt everything. But if you think otherwise — —”
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