Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

"YOURS ON MONDAY, GOD'S TO-DAY."

The warning gong sounded at half-past seven as usual, and at eight the butler announced dinner. Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu had returned from Bodmin, and they were grouped in front of the fire talking in undertones with Mr. Tregonell, while Christabel and the younger Miss Vandeleur sat on a sofa, silent, after a few murmured expressions of grief on the part of the latter lady.

"It is like a dream," sighed Mopsy, this being the one remark which a young person of her calibre inevitably makes upon such an occasion. "It is like a dreadful dream – playing billiards last night, and now – dead! It is too awful."

"Yes, it is awful; Death is always awful," answered Christabel, mechanically.

She had told herself that it was her duty to appear at the dinner-table – to fulfil all her responsibilities as wife and hostess – not to give any one the right to say that she was bemoaning him who had once been her lover; and she was here to do her duty. She wanted all the inhabitants of her little world to see that she mourned for him only as a friend grieves for the loss of a friend – soberly, with pious submission to the Divine Will that had taken him away. For two hours she had remained on her knees beside her bed, drowned in tears, numbed by despair, feeling as if life could not go on without him, as if this heavily-beating heart of hers must be slowly throbbing to extinction: and then the light of reason had begun to glimmer through the thick gloom of grief, and her lips had moved in prayer, and, as if in answer to her prayers, came the image of her child, to comfort and sustain her.

"Let me not dishonour my darling," she prayed. "Let me remember that I am a mother as well as a wife. If I owe my husband very little, I owe my son everything."

Inspired by that sweet thought of her boy, unwilling, for his sake, to give occasion for even the feeblest scandal, she had washed the tears from her pale cheeks, and put on a dinner gown, and had gone down to the drawing-room just ten minutes before the announcement of dinner.

She remembered how David, when his beloved was dead, had risen and washed and gone back to the business of life. "What use are my tears to him, now he is gone?" she said to herself, as she went downstairs.

Miss Bridgeman was not in the drawing-room; but Mopsy was there, dressed in black, and looking very miserable.

"I could not get poor Dop to come down," she said, apologetically. "She has been lying on her bed crying ever since she heard the dreadful news. She is so sensitive, poor girl; and she liked him so much; and he had been so attentive to her. I hope you'll excuse her?"

"Please don't apologize. I can quite imagine that this shock has been dreadful for her – for every one in the house. Perhaps you would rather dine upstairs, so as to be with your sister?"

"No!" answered Mopsy, taking Christabel's hand, with a touch of real feeling. "I had rather be with you. You must feel his loss more than we can – you had known him so much longer."

"Yes, it is just five years since he came to Mount Royal. Five years is not much in the lives of some people; but it seems the greater part of my life."

"We will go away to-morrow," said Mopsy. "I am sure you will be glad to get rid of us: it will be a relief, I mean. Perhaps at some future time you will let us come again for a little while. We have been so intensely happy here."

"Then I shall be happy for you to come again – next summer, if we are here," answered Christabel, kindly, moved by Mopsy's naïveté: "one can never tell. Next year seems so far off in the hour of trouble."

Dinner was announced, and they all went in, and made believe to dine, in a gloomy silence, broken now and then by dismal attempts at general conversation on the part of the men. Once Mopsy took heart of grace and addressed her brother:

"Did you like the hanging, Jack?" she asked, as if it were a play.

"No, it was hideous, detestable. I will never put myself in the way of being so tortured again. The guillotine is swifter and more merciful. I saw a man blown from a gun in India – there were bits of him on my boots when I got home – but it was not so bad as the hanging to-day: the limp, helpless, figure, swaying and trembling in the hangman's grip while they put the noose on, the cap dragged roughly over the ghastly face, the monotonous croak of the parson reading on like a machine, while the poor wretch was being made ready for his doom. It was all horrible to the last degree. Why can't we poison our criminals: let them die comfortably, as Socrates died, of a dose of some strong narcotic. The parson might have some chance – sitting by the dying man's bed, in the quiet of his cell."

"It would be much nicer," said Mopsy.

"Where's Miss Bridgeman?" Leonard asked suddenly, looking round the table, as if only that moment perceiving her absence.

"She is not in her room, Sir. Mary thinks she has gone out," answered the butler.

"Gone out – after dark. What can have been her motive for going out at such an hour?" asked Leonard of his wife, angrily.

"I have no idea. She may have been sent for by some sick person. You know how good she is."

"I know what a humbug she is," retorted Leonard. "Daniel, go and find out if any messenger came for Miss Bridgeman – or if she left any message for your mistress."

Daniel went out, and came back again in five minutes. No one had seen any messenger – no one had seen Miss Bridgeman go out.

"That's always the case here when I want to ascertain a fact," growled Leonard: "no one sees or knows anything. There are twice too many servants for one to be decently served. Well, it doesn't matter much. Miss Bridgeman is old enough to take care of herself – and if she walks off a cliff – it will be her loss and nobody else's."

"I don't think you ought to speak like that of a person whom your mother loved – and who is my most intimate friend," said Christabel, with grave reproach.

Leonard had drunk a good deal at dinner; and indeed there had been an inclination on the part of all three men to drown their gloomy ideas in wine, while even Mopsy, who generally took her fair share of champagne, allowed the butler to fill her glass rather oftener than usual – sighing as she sipped the sparkling bright-coloured wine, and remembering, even in the midst of her regret for the newly dead, that she would very soon have returned to a domicile where Moët was not the daily beverage, nay, where, at times, the very beer-barrel ran dry.

After dinner Christabel went to the nursery. It flashed upon her with acutest pain as she entered the room, that when last she had been there she had not known of Angus Hamleigh's death. He had been lying yonder by the waterfall, dead, and she had not known. And now the fact of his death was an old thing – part of the history of her life.

The time when he was alive and with her, full of bright thoughts and poetic fancies, seemed ever so long ago. Yet it was only yesterday – yesterday, and gone from her life as utterly as if it were an episode in the records of dead and gone ages – as old as the story of Tristan and Iseult. She sat with her boy till he fell asleep, and sat beside him as he slept, in the dim light of the night-lamp, thinking of him who lay dead in the lonely farmhouse among those green hills they two had loved so well – hushed by the voice of the distant sea, sounding far inland in the silence of night.

She remembered how he had talked last night of the undiscovered country, and how, as he talked, with flushed cheeks, and too brilliant eyes, she had seen the stamp of death on his face. They had talked of "The Gates Ajar," a book which they had read together in the days gone by, and which Christabel had often returned to since that time – a book in which the secrets of the future are touched lightly by a daring but a delicate hand – a book which accepts every promise of the Gospel in its most literal sense, and overflows with an exultant belief in just such a Heaven as poor humanity wants. In this author's creed transition from death to life is instant – death is the Lucina of life. There is no long lethargy of the grave, there is no time of darkness. Straight from the bed of death the spirit rushes to the arms of the beloved ones who have gone before. Death, so glorified, becomes only the reunion of love.

He had talked of Socrates, and the faithful few who waited at the prison doors in the early morning, when the sacred ship had returned, and the end was near; and of that farewell discourse in the upper chamber of the house at Jerusalem which seems dimly foreshadowed by the philosopher's converse with his disciples – at Athens, the struggle towards light – at Jerusalem the light itself in fullest glory.

Christabel felt herself bound by no social duty to return to the drawing-room, more especially as Miss Vandeleur had gone upstairs to sit with the afflicted Dopsy – who was bewailing the dead very sincerely in her own fashion, with little bursts of hysterical tears and fragmentary remarks.

"I know he didn't care a straw for me" – she gasped, dabbing her temples with a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne – "yet it seemed sometimes almost as if he did: he was so attentive – but then he had such lovely manners – no doubt he was just as attentive to all girls. Oh, Mop, if he had cared for me, and if I had married him – what a paradise this earth would have been. Mr. Tregonell told me that he had quite four thousand a year."

And thus – and thus, with numerous variations on the same theme – poor Dopsy mourned for the dead man; while the low murmur of the distant sea, beating for ever and for ever against the horned cliffs, and dashing silvery white about the base of that Mechard Rock which looks like a couchant lion keeping guard over the shore, sounded like a funeral chorus in the pauses of her talk.

It was half-past ten when Christabel left her boy's bedside, and, on her way to her own room, suddenly remembered Jessie's unexplained absence.

She knocked at Miss Bridgeman's door twice, but there was no answer, and then she opened the door and looked in, expecting to find the room empty.

Jessie was sitting in front of the fire in her hat and jacket, staring at the burning coals. There was no light in the room, except the glow and flame of the fire, but even in that cheerful light Jessie looked deadly pale. "Jessie," exclaimed Christabel, going up to her and putting a gentle hand upon her shoulder, for she took no notice of the opening of the door, "where in heaven's name have you been?"

"Where should I have been? Surely you can guess! I have been to see him."

"To the farm – alone – at night?"

"Alone – at night – yes! I would have walked through storm and fire – I would have walked through – " she set her lips like iron, and muttered through her clenched teeth, "Hell."

"Jessie, Jessie, how foolish! What good could it do?"

"None to him, I know, but perhaps a little to me. I think if I had stayed here I should have gone stark, staring mad. I felt my brain reeling as I sat and thought of him in the twilight, and then it seemed to me as if the only comfort possible was in looking at his dead face – holding his dead hand – and I have done it, and am comforted – a little," she said, with a laugh, which ended in a convulsive sob.

"My good warm-hearted Jessie!" murmured Christabel, bending over her lovingly, tears raining down her cheeks; "I know you always liked him."

"Always liked him!" echoed the other, staring at the fire, in blank tearless grief; "liked him? yes, always."

"But you must not take his death so despairingly, dear. You know that, under the fairest circumstances, he had not very long to live. We both knew that."

"Yes! we knew it. I knew – thought that I had realized the fact – told myself every day that in a few months he would be hidden from us under ground – gone to a life where we cannot follow him even with our thoughts, though we pretend to be so sure about it, as those women do in 'The Gates Ajar.' I told myself this every day. And yet, now that he is snatched away suddenly – cruelly – mysteriously – it is as hard to bear as if I had believed that he would live a hundred years. I am not like you, a piece of statuesque perfection. I cannot say 'Thy will be done,' when my dearest – the only man I ever loved upon this wide earth is snatched from me. Does that shock your chilly propriety, you who only half loved him, and who broke his heart at another woman's bidding? Yes! I loved him from the first – loved him all the while he was your lover, and found it enough for happiness to be in his company – to see and hear him, and answer every thought of his with sympathetic thoughts of mine – understanding him quicker and better than you could, bright as you are – happy to go about with you two – to be the shadow in the sunshine of your glad young lives, just as a dog who loved him would have been happy following at his heels. Yes, Belle, I loved him – I think almost from the hour he came here, in the sweet autumn twilight, when I saw that poetic face, half in fire-glow and half in darkness – loved him always, always, always, and admired him as the most perfect among men!"

"Jessie, my dearest, my bravest! And you were so true and loyal. You never by word or look betrayed – "

"What do you think of me?" cried Jessie, indignantly. "Do you suppose that I would not rather have cut out my tongue – thrown myself off the nearest cliff – than give him one lightest occasion to suspect what a paltry-souled creature I was – so weak that I could not cure myself of loving another woman's lover. While he lived I hated myself for my folly; now he is dead, I glory in the thought of how I loved him – how I gave him the most precious treasures of my soul – my reverence – my regard – my tears and hopes and prayers. Those are the only gold and frankincense and myrrh which the poor of this earth can offer, and I gave them freely to my divinity!"

Christabel laid her hand upon the passionate lips; and, kneeling by her friend's side, comforted her with gentle caresses.

"Do you suppose I am not sorry for him, Jessie?" she said reproachfully, after a long pause.

"Yes, no doubt you are, in your way; but it is such an icy way."

"Would you have me go raving about the house – I, Leonard's wife, Leo's mother? I try to resign myself to God's will: but I shall remember him till the end of my days, with unspeakable sorrow. He was like sunshine in my life; so that life without him seemed all one dull gray, till the baby came, and brought me back to the sunlight, and gave me new duties, new cares!"

"Yes! you can find comfort in a baby's arms – that is a blessing. My comfort was to see my beloved in his bloody shroud – shot through the heart – shot through the heart! Well, the inquest will find out something to-morrow, I hope; but I want you to go with me to-morrow morning, as soon as it is light, to the Kieve."

"What for?"

"To see the spot where he died."

"What will be the good, Jessie? I know the place too well; it has been in my mind all this evening."

"There will be some good, perhaps. At any rate, I want you to go with me; and if there ever was any reality in your love, if you are not merely a beautiful piece of mechanism, with a heart that beats by clockwork, you will go."

"If you wish it I will go."

"As soon as it is light – say at seven o'clock."

"I will not go till after breakfast. I want the business of the house to go on just as calmly as if this calamity had never happened. I don't want any one to be able to say, 'Mrs. Tregonell is in despair at the loss of her old lover.'"

"In fact you want people to suppose that you never cared for him!"

"They cannot suppose that, when I was once so proud of my love. All I want is that no one should think I loved him too well after I was a wife and mother. I will give no occasion for scandal."

"Didn't I say that you were a handsome automaton?"

"I do not want any one to say hard things of me when I am dead – hard things that my son may hear."

"When you are dead! You talk as if you thought you were to die soon. You are of the stuff that wears to threescore-and-ten, and even beyond the Psalmist's limit. There is no friction for natures of your calibre. When Werther had shot himself, Charlotte went on cutting bread and butter, don't you know? It was her nature to be proper, and good, and useful, and never to give offence – her nature to cut bread and butter," concluded Jessie, laughing bitterly.

Christabel stayed with her for an hour, talking to her, consoling her, speaking hopefully of that unknown world, so fondly longed for, so piously believed in by the woman who had learnt her creed at Mrs. Tregonell's knees. Many tears were shed by Christabel during that hour of mournful talk; but not one by Jessie Bridgeman. Hers was a dry-eyed grief.

"After breakfast then we will walk to the Kieve," said Jessie, as Christabel left her. "Would it be too much to ask you to make it as early as you can?"

"I will go the moment I am free. Good-night, dear."

CHAPTER III

DUEL OR MURDER?

All the household appeared at breakfast next morning; even poor Dopsy, who felt that she could not nurse her grief in solitude any longer. "It's behaving too much as if you were his widow," Mopsy had told her, somewhat harshly; and then there was the task of packing, since they were to leave Mount Royal at eleven, in order to be at Launceston in time for the one o'clock train. This morning's breakfast was less silent than the dinner of yesterday. Everybody felt as if Mr. Hamleigh had been dead at least a week.

Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu discussed the sad event openly, as if the time for reticence were past; speculated and argued as to how the accident could have happened; talked learnedly about guns; wondered whether the country surgeon was equal to the difficulties of the case.

"I can't understand," said Mr. Montagu, "if he was found lying in the hollow by the waterfall, how his gun came to go off. If he had been going through a hedge, or among the brushwood on the slope of the hill, it would be easy enough to see how the thing might have happened; but as it is, I'm all in the dark."

"You had better go and watch the inquest, and make yourself useful to the coroner," sneered Leonard, who had been drinking his coffee in moody silence until now. "You seem to think yourself so uncommonly clever and far seeing."

"Well, I flatter myself I know as much about sport as most men; and I've handled a gun before to-day, and know that the worst gun that was ever made won't go off and shoot a fellow through the heart without provocation of some kind."

"Who said he was shot through the heart?"

"Somebody did – one of your people, I think."

Mrs. Tregonell sat at the other end of the table, half hidden by the large old-fashioned silver urn, and next her sat Jessie Bridgeman, a spare small figure in a close-fitting black gown, a pale drawn face with a look of burnt-out fires – pale as the crater when the volcanic forces have exhausted themselves. At a look from Christabel she rose, and they two left the room together. Five minutes later they had left the house, and were walking towards the cliff, by following which they could reach the Kieve without going down into Boscastle. It was a wild walk for a windy autumn day; but these two loved its wildness – had walked here in many a happy hour, with souls full of careless glee. Now they walked silently, swiftly, looking neither to the sea nor the land, though both were at their loveliest in the shifting lights and shadows of an exquisite October morning – sunshine enough to make one believe it was summer – breezes enough to blow about the fleecy clouds in the blue clear sky, to ripple the soft dun-coloured heather on the hillocky common, and to give life and variety to the sea.

It was a long walk; but the length of the way seemed of little account to these two. Christabel had only the sense of a dreary monotony of grief. Time and space had lost their meaning. This dull aching sorrow was to last for ever – till the grave – broken only by brief intervals of gladness and forgetfulness with her boy.

To-day she could hardly keep this one source of consolation in her mind. All her thoughts were centred upon him who lay yonder dead.

"Jessie," she said, suddenly laying her hand on her companion's wrist, as they crossed the common above the slate-quarry, seaward of Trevalga village, with its little old church and low square tower. "Jessie, I am not going to see him."

"What weak stuff you are made of," muttered Jessie, contemptuously, turning to look into the white frightened face. "No, you are not going to look upon the dead. You would be afraid, and it might cause scandal. No, you are only going to see the place where he died; and then perhaps you, or I, will see a little further into the darkness that hides his fate. You heard how those men were puzzling their dull brains about it at breakfast. Even they can see that there is a mystery."

"What do you mean?"

"Only as much as I say. I know nothing – yet."

"But you suspect – ?"

"Yes. My mind is full of suspicion; but it is all guess-work – no shred of evidence to go upon."

They came out of a meadow into the high road presently – the pleasant rustic road which so many happy holiday-making people tread in the sweet summer time – the way to that wild spot where England's first hero was born; the Englishman's Troy, cradle of that fair tradition out of which grew the Englishman's Iliad.

Beside the gate through which they came lay that mighty slab of spar which has been christened King Arthur's Quoit, but which the Rector of Trevalga declared to be the covering stone of a Cromlech. Christabel remembered how facetious they had all been about Arthur and his game of quoits, five years ago, in the bright autumn weather, when the leaves were blown about so lightly in the warm west wind. And now the leaves fell with a mournful heaviness, and every falling leaf seemed an emblem of death.

They went to the door of the farmhouse to get the key of the gate which leads to the Kieve. Christabel stood in the little quadrangular garden, looking up at the house, while Jessie rang and asked for what she wanted.

"Did no one except Mr. Hamleigh go to the Kieve yesterday until the men went to look for him?" she asked of the young woman who brought her the key.

"No one else, Miss. No one but him had the key. They found it in the pocket of his shooting jacket when he was brought here."

Involuntarily, Jessie put the key to her lips. His hand was almost the last that had touched it.

Just as they were leaving the garden, where the last of the yellow dahlias were fading, Christabel took Jessie by the arm, and stopped her.

"In which room is he lying?" she asked. "Can we see the window from here?"

"Yes, it is that one."

Jessie pointed to a low, latticed window in the old gray house – a casement round which myrtle and honeysuckle clung lovingly. The lattice stood open. The soft sweet air was blowing into the room, just faintly stirring the white dimity curtain. And he was lying there in that last ineffable repose.

They went up the steep lane, between tall tangled hedges, where the ragged robin still showed his pinky blossoms, and many a pale yellow hawksweed enlivened the faded foliage, while the ferns upon the banks, wet from yesterday's rain, still grew rankly green.

On the crest of the hill the breeze grew keener, and the dead leaves were being ripped from the hedgerows, and whirled down into the hollow, where the autumn wind seemed to follow Christabel and Jessie as they descended, with a long plaintive minor cry, like the lament at an Irish funeral. All was dark and desolate in the green valley, as Jessie unlocked the gate, and they went slowly down the steep slippery path, among moss-grown rock and drooping fern – down and down, by sharply winding ways, so narrow that they could only go one by one, till they came within the sound of the rushing water, and then down into the narrow cleft, where the waterfall tumbles into a broad shallow bed, and dribbles away among green slimy rocks.

Here there is a tiny bridge – a mere plank – that spans the water, with a hand-rail on one side. They crossed this, and stood on the broad flat stone on the other side. This is the very heart of St. Nectan's mystery. Here, high in air, the water pierces the rock, and falls, a slender silvery column, into the rocky bed below.