Later there had been letters from Christabel — letters written in Switzerland — in which the writer confined herself almost entirely to news of the boy’s growth and improvement, and to the particulars of their movements from one place to another — letters which gave not the faintest indication of the writer’s frame of mind: as devoid of sentiment as an official communication from one legation to another.
He was going back to Mount Royal therefore in profound ignorance of his wife’s feelings — whether he would be received with smiles or frowns, with tears or sullen gloom. Albeit not of a sensitive nature, this uncertainty made him uncomfortable, and he looked at yonder faint grey shore — the peaks and pinnacles of that wild western coast — without any of those blissful emotions which the returning wanderer always experiences — in poetry.
Plymouth, however, where they went ashore next morning, seemed a very enjoyable place after the cities of South America. It was not so picturesque a town, nor had it that rowdy air and dissipated flavour which Mr. Tregonell appreciated in the cities of the South; but it had a teeming life and perpetual movement, which were unknown on the shores of the Pacific; the press and hurry of many industries — the steady fervour of a town where wealth is made by honest labour — the intensity of a place which is in somewise the cradle of naval warfare. Mr. Tregonell breakfasted and lunched at the Duke of Cornwall, strolled on the Hoe, played two or three games on the first English billiard-table he had seen for a year, and found a novel delight in winners and losers.
An afternoon train took the travellers on to Launceston, where the Mount Royal wagonette, and a cart for the luggage, were waiting for them at the station.
“Everything right at the Mount?” asked Leonard, as Nicholls touched his hat.
“Yes, Sir.”
He asked for no details, but took the reins from Nicholls without another word. Captain Vandeleur jumped up by his side, Nicholls got in at the back, with a lot of the smaller luggage — gun-cases, dressing-bags, despatch-boxes — and away they went up the castle hill, and then sharp round to the right, and off at a dashing pace along the road to the moor. It was a two hours’ drive even for the best goers; but Mr. Tregonell spoke hardly a dozen times during the journey, smoking all the way, and with his eyes always on his horses.
At last they wound up the hill to Mount Royal, and passed the lodge, and saw all the lights of the old wide-spreading Tudor front shining upon them through the thickening grey of early evening.
“A good old place, isn’t it?” said Leonard, just a little moved at sight of the house in which he had been born. “A man might come home to a worse shelter.”
“This man might come home to lodgings in Chelsea,” said Jack Vandeleur, touching himself lightly on the breast, with a grim laugh. “It’s a glorious old place, and you needn’t apologize for being proud of it. And now we’ve come back, I hope you are going to be jolly, for you’ve been uncommonly glum while we’ve been away. The house looks cheerful, doesn’t it? I should think it must be full of company.”
“Not likely,” answered Leonard. “Christabel never cared about having people. We should have lived like hermits if she had had her way.”
“Then if the house isn’t full of people, all I can say is there’s a good deal of candlelight going to waste,” said Captain Vandeleur.
They were driving up to the porch by this time; the door stood wide open; servants were on the watch for them. The hall was all aglow with light and fire; people were moving about near the hearth. It was a relief to Leonard to see this life and brightness. He had feared to find a dark and silent house — a melancholy welcome — all things still in mourning for the untimely dead.
A ripple of laughter floated from the hall as Leonard drew up his horses, and two tall slim figures with fluffy heads, short-waisted gowns, and big sashes, came skipping down the broad shallow steps.
“My sisters, by Jove,” cried Jack, delighted. “How awfully jolly of Mrs. Tregonell to invite them.”
Leonard’s only salutation to the damsels was a friendly nod. He brushed by them as they grouped themselves about their brother — like a new edition of Laocoon without the snakes, or the three Graces without the grace — and hurried into the hall, eager to be face to face with his wife. She came forward to meet him, looking her loveliest, dressed as he had never seen her dressed before, with a style, a chic, and a daring more appropriate to the Théâtre Français than to a Cornish squire’s house. She who, even in the height of the London season, had been simplicity itself, recalling to those who most admired her, the picture of that chaste and unworldly maiden who dwelt beside the Dove, now wore an elaborate costume of brown velvet and satin, in which a Louis Quinze velvet coat, with large cut-steel buttons and Mechlin jabot, was the most striking feature. Her fair, soft hair was now fluffy, and stood up in an infinity of frizzy curls from the broad white forehead. Diamond solitaires flashed in her ears, her hands glittered with the rainbow light of old family rings, which in days gone by she had been wont to leave in the repose of an iron safe. The whole woman was changed. She came to meet her husband with a Society smile; shook hands with him as if he had been a commonplace visitor — he was too startled to note the death-like coldness of that slender hand — and welcomed him with a conventional inquiry about his passage from Buenos Ayres.
He stood transfixed — overwhelmed by surprise. The room was full of people. There was Mrs. Fairfax Torrington, liveliest and most essentially modern of well-preserved widows, always dans le mouvement, as she said of herself; and there, lolling against the high oak chimney-piece, with an air of fatuous delight in his own attractiveness, was that Baron de Cazalet — pseudo artist, poet, and littérateur, who, five seasons ago, had been an object of undisguised detestation with Christabel. He, too, was essentially in the movement — æsthetic, cynical, agnostic, thought-reading, spiritualistic — always blowing the last fashionable bubble, and making his bubbles bigger and brighter than other people’s — a man who prided himself upon his “intensity” in every pursuit — from love-making to gourmandize. There, again, marked out from the rest by a thoroughly prosaic air, which, in these days of artistic sensationalism is in itself a distinction — pale, placid, taking his ease in a low basket chair, with his languid hand on Randie’s black muzzle — sat Mr. FitzJesse, the journalist, proprietor and editor of The Sling, a fashionable weekly — the man who was always smiting the Goliahs of pretence and dishonesty with a pen that was sharper than any stone that ever David slung against the foe. He was such an amiable-looking man — had such a power of obliterating every token of intellectual force and fire from the calm surface of his countenance, that people, seeing him for the first time, were apt to stare at him in blank wonder at his innocent aspect. Was this the wielder of that scathing pen — was this the man who wrote not with ink but with aqua fortis? Even his placid matter-of-fact speech was, at first, a little disappointing. It was only by gentlest degrees that the iron hand of satire made itself felt under the velvet glove of conventional good manners. Leonard had met Mr. FitzJesse in London, at the clubs and elsewhere, and had felt that vague awe which the provincial feels for the embodied spirit of metropolitan intellect in the shape of a famous journalist. It was needful to be civil to such men, in order to be let down gently in their papers. One never knew when some rash unpremeditated act might furnish matter for a paragraph which would mean social annihilation.
There were other guests grouped about the fireplace — little Monty, the useful and good-humoured country-house hack; Colonel Blathwayt, of the Kildare Cavalry, a noted amateur actor, reciter, waltzer, spirit-rapper, invaluable in a house full of people — a tall, slim-waisted man, who rode nine stone, and at forty contrived to look seven-and-twenty; the Rev. St. Bernard Faddie, an Anglican curate, who carried Ritualism to the extremest limit consistent with the retention of his stipend as a minister of the Church of England, and who was always at loggerheads with some of his parishioners. There were Mr. and Mrs. St. Aubyn and their two daughters
— county people, with loud voices, horsey, and doggy, and horticultural — always talking garden, when they were not talking stable or kennel. These were neighbours for whom Christabel had cared very little in the past. Leonard was considerably astonished at finding them domiciled at Mount Royal.
“And you had a nice passage,” said his wife, smiling at her lord. “Will you have some tea?”
It seemed a curious kind of welcome to a husband after a year’s absence; but Leonard answered feebly that he would take a cup of tea. One of the numerous tea-tables had been established in a corner near the fire, and Miss Bridgeman, in neat grey silk and linen collar, as of old, was officiating, with Mr. Faddie in attendance, to distribute the cups.
“No tea, thanks,” said Jack Vandeleur, coming in with his sisters still entwined about him, still faintly suggestive of that poor man and the sea-serpents. “Would it be too dreadful if I were to suggest S. & B.?”
Jessie Bridgeman touched a spring bell on the tea-table, and gave the required order. There was a joviality, a laissez-aller in the air of the place, with which soda and brandy seemed quite in harmony. Everything in the house seemed changed to Leonard’s eye; and yet the furniture, the armour, the family portraits, brown and indistinguishable in this doubtful light, were all the same. There were no flowers about in tubs or on tables. That subtle grace — as of a thoughtful woman’s hand ruling and arranging everything, artistic even where seeming most careless — was missing. Papers, books were thrown anyhow upon the tables; whips, carriage-rugs, wraps, hats, encumbered the chairs near the door. Half-a-dozen dogs — pointers, setters, collie — sprawled or prowled about the room. In nowise did his house now resemble the orderly mansion which his mother had ruled so long, and which his wife had maintained upon exactly the same lines after her aunt’s death. He had grumbled at what he called a silly observance of his mother’s fads. The air of the house was now much more in accordance with his own view of life, and yet the change angered as much as it perplexed him.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked, exploring the hall and its occupants, with a blank stare.
“In his nursery. Where should he be?” exclaimed Christabel, lightly.
“I thought he would have been with you. I thought he might have been here to bid me welcome home.”
He had made a picture in his mind, almost involuntarily, of the mother and child — she, calm and lovely as one of Murillo’s Madonnas, with the little one on her knee. There was no vein of poetry in his nature, yet unconsciously the memory of such pictures had associated itself with his wife’s image. And instead of that holy embodiment of maternal love, there flashed and sparkled before him this brilliant woman, with fair fluffy hair, and Louis Quinze coat, all a glitter with cut-steel.
“Home!” echoed Christabel, mockingly; “how sentimental you have grown. I’ve no doubt the boy will be charmed to see you, especially if you have brought him some South American toys; but I thought it would bore you to see him before you had dined. He shall be on view in the drawing-room before dinner, if you would really like to see him so soon.”
“Don’t trouble,” said Leonard, curtly; “I can find my way to the nursery.”
He went upstairs without another word, leaving his friend Jack seated in the midst of the cheerful circle, drinking soda water and brandy, and talking of their adventures upon the backbone of South America.
“Delicious country!” said de Cazalet, who talked remarkably good English, with just the faintest Hibernian accent. “I have ridden over every inch of it. Ah, Mrs. Tregonell, that is the soil for poetry and adventure; a land of extinct volcanoes. If Byron had known the shores of the Amazon, he would have struck a deeper note of passion than any that was ever inspired by the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus. Sad that so grand a spirit should have pined in the prison-house of a worn-out world.”
“I have always understood that Byron got some rather strong poetry out of Switzerland and Italy,” murmured Mr. FitzJesse, meekly.
“Weak and thin to what he might have written had he known the Pampas,” said the Baron.
“You have done the Pampas?” said Mr. FitzJesse.
“I have lived amongst wild horses, and wilder humanity, for months at a stretch.”
“And you have published a volume of — verses?”
“Another of my youthful follies. But I do not place myself upon a level with Byron.”
“I should if I were you,” said Mr. FitzJesse. “It would be an original idea — and in an age marked by a total exhaustion of brain-power, an original idea is a pearl of price.”
“What kind of dogs did you see in your travels?” asked Emily St. Aubyn, a well-grown upstanding young woman, in a severe tailor-gown of undyed homespun.
“Two or three very fine breeds of mongrels.”
“I adore mongrels!” exclaimed Mopsy. “I think that kind of dog which belongs to no particular breed, which has been ill-used by London boys, and which follows one to one’s doorstep, is the most faithful and intelligent of the whole canine race. Huxley may exalt Blenheim spaniels as the nearest thing to human nature; but my dog Tim, which is something between a lurcher, a collie, and a bull, is ever so much better than human nature.”
“The Blenheim is greedy, luxurious, and lazy, and generally dies in middle life from the consequences of over-feeding,” drawled Mr. FitzJesse. “I don’t think Huxley is very far out.”
“I would back a Cornish sheep-dog against any animal in creation,” said Christabel, patting Randie, who was standing amiably on end, with his fore-paws on the cushioned elbow of her chair. “Do you know that these dogs smile when they are pleased, and cry when they are grieved — and they will mourn for a master with a fidelity unknown in humanity.”
“Which as a rule does not mourn,” said FitzJesse. “It only goes into mourning.”
And so the talk went on, always running upon trivialities — glancing from theme to theme — a mere battledore and shuttlecock conversation — making a mock of most things and most people. Christabel joined in it all; and some of the bitterest speech that was spoken in that hour before the sounding of the seven o’clock gong, fell from her perfect lips.
“Did you ever see such a change in any one as in Mrs. Tregonell?” asked Dopsy of Mopsy, as they elbowed each other before the looking-glass, the first armed with a powder puff, the second with a little box containing the implements required for the production of piquant eyebrows.
“A wonderful improvement,” answered Mopsy. “She’s ever so much easier to get on with. I didn’t think it was in her to be so thoroughly chic.”
“Do you know, I really liked her better last year, when she was frumpy and dowdy,” faltered Dopsy. “I wasn’t able to get on with her, but I couldn’t help looking up to her, and feeling that, after all, she was the right kind of woman. And now — —”
“And now she condescends to be human — to be one of us — and the consequence is that her house is three times as nice as it was last year,” said Mopsy, turning the corner of an eyebrow with a bold but careful hand, and sending a sharp elbow into Dopsy’s face during the operation.
“I wish you’d be a little more careful,” ejaculated Dopsy.
“I wish you’d contrive not to want the glass exactly when I do,” retorted Mopsy.
“How do you like the French Baron?” asked Dopsy, when a brief silence had restored her equanimity.
“French, indeed! He is no more French than I am. Mr. FitzJesse told me that he was born and brought up in Jersey — that his father was an Irish Major on half-pay, and his mother a circus rider.”
“But how does he come by his title — if it is a real title?”
“FitzJesse says the title is right enough. One of his father’s ancestors came to the South of Ireland after the revocation of something — a treaty at Nancy — I think he said. He belonged to an old Huguenot family — those people who were massacred in the opera, don’t you know — and the title had been allowed to go dead — till this man married a tremendou
sly rich Sheffield cutler’s daughter, and bought the old estate in Provence, and got himself enrolled in the French peerage. Romantic, isn’t it?”
“Very. What became of the Sheffield cutler’s daughter?”
“She drank herself to death two years after her marriage. FitzJesse says they both lived upon brandy, but she hadn’t been educated up to it, and it killed her.”
“A curious kind of man for Mrs. Tregonell to invite here. Not quite good style.”
“Perhaps not — but he’s very amusing.”
Leonard spent half an hour with his son. The child had escaped from babyhood in the year that had gone. He was now a bright sentient creature, eager to express his thoughts — to gather knowledge — an active, vivacious being, full of health and energy. Whatever duties Christabel had neglected during her husband’s absence, the boy had, at least, suffered no neglect. Never had childhood developed under happier conditions. The father could find no fault in the nursery, though there was a vague feeling in his mind that everything was wrong at Mount Royal.
“Why the deuce did she fill the house with people while I was away,” he muttered to himself, in the solitude of his dressing-room, where his clothes had been put ready for him, and candles lighted by his Swiss valet. The dressing-room was at that end of the corridor most remote from Christabel’s apartments. It communicated with the room Leonard had slept in during his boyhood — and that opened again into his gun-room.
The fact that these rooms had been prepared for him told him plainly enough that he and his wife were henceforth to lead divided lives. The event of last October, his year of absence, had built up a wall between them which he, for the time being at least, felt himself powerless to knock down.
“Can she suspect — can she know” — he asked himself, pausing in his dressing to stand staring at the fire, with moody brow and troubled eyes. “No, that’s hardly possible. And yet her whole manner is changed. She holds me at a distance. Every look, every tone just now was a defiance. Of course I know that she loved that man — loved him first — last — always; never caring a straw for me. She was too careful of herself — had been brought up too well to go wrong, like other women — but she loved him. I would never have brought him inside these doors if I had not known that she could take care of herself. I tested and tried her to the uttermost — and — well — I took my change out of him.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 722