The two girls came down to the drawing-room, and dinner was announced.

It was a very dismal dinner--the dreariest that had ever been eaten in that house, Christabel thought. Mrs. Tregonell was absorbed in her own thoughts, absent, automatic in all she said and did. The Major maintained a forced hilarity, which was more painful than silence.

Jessie looked anxious.

"I'll tell you what, girls," said Major Bree, as the mournful meal languished towards its melancholy close, "we seem all very doleful without Hamleigh. I'll run round to Bond Street directly after dinner, and see if I can get three stalls for 'Lohengrin.' They are often to be had at the last moment."

"Please, don't," said Christabel, earnestly; "I would not go to a theatre again without Angus. I am sorry I went the other night. It was obstinate and foolish of me to insist upon seeing that play, and I was punished for it by that horrid old woman this afternoon."

"But you liked the play?"

"Yes--while I was seeing it; but now I have taken a dislike to Miss Mayne. I feel as if I had seen a snake--all grace and lovely colour--and had caught hold of it, only to find that it was a snake."

The Major stared and looked alarmed. Was this an example of instinct superior to reason?

"Let me try for the opera," he said. "I'm sure it would do you good to go. You will sit in the front drawing-room listening for hansoms all the evening, fancying that every pair of wheels you hear is bringing Angus back to you."

"I would rather be doing that than be sitting at the opera, thinking of him. But I'm afraid there's no chance of his coming to-night. His letter to-day told me that his aunt insists upon his staying two or three days longer, and that she is ill enough to make him anxious to oblige her."

The evening pa.s.sed in placid dreariness. Mrs. Tregonell sat brooding in her armchair--pondering whether she should or should not tell Christabel everything--knowing but too well how the girl's happiness was dependent upon her undisturbed belief in her lover, yet repeating to herself again and again that it was right and fair that Christabel should know the truth--nay, ever so much better that she should be told it now, when she was still free to shape her own future, than that she should make the discovery later, when she was Angus Hamleigh's wife. This last consideration--the thought, that a secret which was everybody's secret must inevitably, sooner or later, become known to Christabel--weighed heavily with Mrs. Tregonell; and through all her meditations there was interwoven the thought of her absent son, and how his future welfare might depend upon the course to be taken now.

Christabel played and sang, while the Major and Jessie Bridgeman sat at bezique. The friendship of these two had been in no wise disturbed by the Major's offer, and the lady's rejection. It was the habit of both to take life pleasantly. Jessie took pains to show the Major how sincerely she valued his esteem--how completely she appreciated the fine points of his character; and he was too much a gentleman to remind her by one word or tone of his disappointment that day in the wood above Maidenhead.

The evening came to its quiet end at last. Christabel had scarcely left her piano in the dim little third room--she had sat there in the faint light, playing slow sleepy nocturnes and lieder, and musing, musing sadly, with a faint sick dread of coming sorrow. She had seen it in her aunt's face. When the old buhl clock chimed the half-hour after ten the Major got up and took his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he pressed her hand at parting to murmur: "Remember," with an accent as solemn as Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon.

Mrs. Tregonell answered never a word. She had been pondering and wavering all the evening, but had come to no fixed conclusion.

She bade the two girls good-night directly the Major was gone. She told herself that she had the long tranquil night before her for the resolution of her doubts. She would sleep upon this vexed question. But before she had been ten minutes in her room there came a gentle knock at the door, and Christabel stole softly to her side.

"Auntie, dear, I want to talk to you before you go to bed, if you are not very tired. May Dormer go for a little while?"

Dormer, gravest and most discreet of handmaids, whose name seemed to have been made on purpose for her, looked at her mistress, and receiving a little nod, took up her work and crept away. Dormer was never seen without her needlework. She complained that there was so little to do for Mrs. Tregonell that unless she had plenty of plain sewing she must expire for want of occupation, having long outlived such frivolity as sweethearts and afternoons out.

When Dormer was gone, Christabel came to her aunt's chair, and knelt down beside it just as she had done at Mount Royal, when she told her of Angus Hamleigh's offer.

"Aunt Diana, what has happened, what is wrong?" she asked, coming at the heart of the question at once. There was no shadow of doubt in her mind that something was sorely amiss.

"How do you know that there is anything wrong?"

"I have known it ever since that horrible old woman--Medusa in a bonnet all over flowers--pansies instead of snakes--talked about Cupid and Psyche. And you knew it, and made her stop to tell you all about it.

There is some cruel mystery--something that involves my fate with that of the actress I saw the other night."

Mrs. Tregonell sat with her hands tightly clasped, her brows bent. She felt herself taken by storm, as it were, surprised into decision before she had time to make up her mind.

"Since you know so much, perhaps you had better know all," she said, gloomily; and then she told the story, shaping it as delicately as she could for a girl's ear.

Christabel covered her face with her clasped hands, and listened without a sigh or a tear. The pain she felt was too dull and vague as yet for the relief of tears. The horrible surprise, the sudden darkening of the dream of her young life, the clouding over of every hope, these were shapeless horrors which she could hardly realize at first. Little by little this serpent would unfold its coils; drop by drop this poison would steal through her veins, until its venom filled her heart. He, whom she had supposed all her own, with whose every thought she had fancied herself familiar, he, of whose heart she had believed herself the sole and sovereign mistress, had been one little year ago the slave of another--loving with so pa.s.sionate a love that he had not shrunk from letting all the world know his idolatry. Yes, all those people who had smiled at her, and said sweet things to her, and congratulated her on her engagement, had known all the while that this lover, of whom she was so proud, was only the cast-off idolater of an actress; had come to her only when life's master-pa.s.sion was worn threadbare, and had become a stale and common thing for him. At the first, womanly pride felt the blow as keenly as womanly love. To be made a mock of by the man she had so loved!

Kneeling there in dumb misery at her aunt's feet, answering never a word to that wretched record of her lover's folly, Christabel's thoughts flew back to that still grey autumn noontide at Pentargon Bay, and the words then spoken. Words, which then had only vaguest meaning, now rose out of the dimness of the past, and stood up in her mind as if they had been living creatures. He had compared himself to Tristan--to one who had sinned and repented--he had spoken of himself as a man whose life had been more than half lived already. He had offered himself to her with no fervid pa.s.sion--with no a.s.sured belief in her power to make him happy.

Nay, he had rather forced from her the confession of her love by his piteous representation of himself as a man doomed to early death. He had wrung from her the offer of a life's devotion. She had given herself to him almost unwooed. Never before had her betrothal appeared to her in this humiliating aspect; but now, enlightened by the knowledge of that former love, a love so reckless and self-sacrificing, it seemed to her that the homage offered her had been of the coldest--that her affection had been placidly accepted, rather than pa.s.sionately demanded of her.

"Fool, fool, fool," she said within herself, bowed to the dust by this deep humiliation.

"My darling, why don't you speak to me?" said Mrs. Tregonell, tenderly, with her arm round the girl's neck, her face leaning down to touch that drooping head.

"What can I say? I feel as if my life had suddenly come to an end, and there were nothing left for me to do, except just to sit still and remember what has been."

"You mean to break with him?"

"Break with him! Why he has never been mine. There is nothing to be broken. It was all a delusion and a dream. I thought he loved me--loved me exactly as I loved him--with the one great and perfect love of a lifetime--and now I know that he never loved me--how could he after having only just left off loving this other woman?--if he had left off loving her. And how could he when she is so perfectly lovely? Why should he have ever ceased to care for her? She had been like his wife, you say--his wife in all but the name--and all the world knew it. What must people have thought of me for stealing away another woman's husband?"

"My dear, the world does not see it in that light. She never was really his wife."

"She ought to have been," answered Christabel, resolutely, yet with quivering lips. "If he cared for her so much as to make himself the world's wonder for her sake he should have married her: a man should not play fast and loose with love."

"It is difficult for us to judge," said Mrs. Tregonell, believing herself moved by the very spirit of justice, "we are not women of the world--we cannot see this matter as the world sees it."

"G.o.d forbid that I should judge as the world judges," exclaimed Christabel, lifting her head for the first time since that story had been told her. "That would be a sorry end of your teaching. What ought I to do?"

"Your own heart must be the arbiter, Christabel. I made up my mind this afternoon that I would not seek to influence you one way or the other.

Your own heart must decide."

"My own heart? No; my heart is too entirely his--too weakly, fondly, foolishly, devoted to him. No, I must think of something beyond my foolish love for him. His honour and mine are at stake. We must be true to ourselves, he and I. But I want to know what you think, Auntie. I want to know what you would have done in such a case. If, when you were engaged to his father, you had discovered that he had been within only a little while"--these last words were spoken with inexpressible pathos, as if here the heart-wound were deepest--"the lover of another woman--bound to her by ties which a man of honour should hold sacred--what would you have done? Would you have shut your eyes resolutely upon that past history? Would you have made up your mind to forget everything, and to try to be happy with him?"

"I don't know, Belle," Mrs. Tregonell answered, helplessly, very anxious to be true and conscientious, and, if she must needs be guide, to guide the girl aright through this perilous pa.s.sage in her life. "It is so difficult at my age to know what one would have done in one's girlhood.

The fires are all burnt out; the springs that moved one then are all broken. Judging now, with the dull deliberation of middle age, I should say it would be a dangerous thing for any girl to marry a man who had been notoriously devoted to another woman--that woman still living, still having power to charm him. How can you ever be secure of his love?

how be sure that he would not be lured back to the old madness? These women are so full of craft--it is their profession to tempt men to destruction. You remember what the Bible says of such? 'They are more bitter than death: their feet go down to death: their steps take hold on h.e.l.l."

"Don't, Auntie," faltered Christabel. "Yes, I understand. Yes, he would tire of me and go back to her very likely. I am not half so lovely, nor half so fascinating. Or, if he were true to honour and duty, he would regret her all his life. He would be always repenting that he had not broken down all barriers and married her. He would see her sometimes on the stage, or in the Park, and just the sight of her face flashing past him would spoil his happiness. Happiness," she repeated, bitterly, "what happiness? what peace could there be for either of us? knowing of that fatal love. I have decided, Auntie, I shall love Angus all the days of my life, but I will never marry him."

Mrs. Tregonell clasped the girl in her arms, and they wept together, one with the slow silent tears of life that was well-nigh worn out, the other with youth's pa.s.sionate sobs--sobs that shook the slender frame.

"My beloved, you have chosen wisely and well," said the widow, her heart throbbing with new hopes--it was not of Angus Hamleigh's certain loss she thought, but of her son Leonard's probable gain--"you have chosen wisely. I do not believe that you could ever have been really happy with him. Your heart would have been consumed with jealous fears--suspicion would have haunted your life--that evil woman's influence would have darkened all your days."

"Don't say another word," pleaded Christabel, in low hoa.r.s.e tones; "I have quite made up my mind. Nothing can change it."

She did not want to be encouraged or praised; she did not want comfort or consolation. Even her aunt's sympathy jarred upon her fretted nerves.

She felt that she must stand alone in her misery, aloof from all human succour.

"Good-night," she said, bending down to touch her aunt's forehead, with tremulous lips.

"Won't you stay, dear? Sleep with me to-night."

"Sleep?" echoed the girl. "No, Auntie dear; I would rather be in my own room!"

She went away without another word, and went slowly back to her own room, the pretty little London bedchamber, bright with new satin-wood furniture and pale blue cretonne hangings, clouded with creamy Indian muslin, a bower-like room, with flowers and books, and a miniature piano in a convenient recess by the fireplace. Here she sat gravely down before her davenport and unlocked one particular drawer, a so-called secret drawer, but as obvious as a secret panel in a melodrama--and took out Angus Hamleigh's letters. The long animated letters written on thin paper, letters which were a journal of his thoughts and feelings, almost as fully recorded as in those voluminous epistles which Werther despatched to his friend--letters which had bridged over the distance between Cornwall and Southern France, and had been the chief delight of Christabel's life through the long slow winter, making her lover her daily companion.

Slowly, slowly, with tears dropping unnoticed every now and then, she turned over the letters, one by one--now pausing to read a few lines--now a whole letter. There is no loving folly of which she had not been guilty with regard to these cherished letters: she had slept with them under her pillow, she had read them over and over again, had garnered them in a perfumed desk, and gone back to them after the lapse of time, had compared them in her own mind with all the cleverest letters that ever were given to the world--with Walpole, with Beckford, with Byron, with Deffand, and Espina.s.se, Sevigne, Carter--and found in them a grace and a charm that surpa.s.sed all these. She had read elegant extracts to her aunt, who confessed that Mr. Hamleigh wrote cleverly, wittily, picturesquely, poetically, but did not perceive that immeasurable superiority to all previous letter-writers. Then came briefer letters, dated from the Albany--notes dashed off hastily in those happy days when their lives were spent for the most part together.

Notes containing suggestions for some new pleasure--appointments--sweet nothings, hardly worth setting down except as an excuse for writing--with here and there a longer letter, written after midnight; a letter in which the writer poured out his soul to his beloved, enlarging on their conversation of the day--that happy talk about themselves and love.

"Who would think, reading these, that he never really cared for me, that I was only an after-thought in his life," she said to herself, bitterly.