Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “My dear, we have not happened to see her — that is all,” replied the Major, without any responsive smile at the bright young face smiling up at him.

  “You have seen her, I suppose?”

  “Yes, I saw her when I was last in London.”

  “Not this time?”

  “Not this time.”

  “You most unenthusiastic person. But, I understand your motive. You have been waiting an opportunity to take Jessie and me to see this divine Psyche. Is she absolutely lovely?”

  “Loveliness is a matter of opinion. She is generally accepted as a particularly pretty woman.”

  “When will you take me to see her?”

  “I have no idea. You have so many engagements — your aunt is always making new ones. I can do nothing without her permission. Surely you like dancing better than sitting in a theatre?”

  “No, I do not. Dancing is delightful enough — but to be in a theatre is to be in fairy-land. It is like going into a new world. I leave myself, and my own life, at the doors — and go to live and love and suffer and be glad with the people in the play. To see a powerful play — really well acted — such acting as we have seen — is to live a new life from end to end in a few hours. It is like getting the essence of a lifetime without any of the actual pain — for when the situation is too terrible, one can pinch oneself and say — it is only a dream — an acted dream.”

  “If you like powerful plays — plays that make you tremble and cry — you would not care twopence for ‘Cupid and Psyche,’” said Major Bree. “It is something between a burlesque and a fairy comedy — a most frivolous kind of entertainment, I believe.”

  “I don’t care how frivolous it is. I have set my heart upon seeing it. I don’t want to be out of the fashion. If you won’t get me a box at the — where is it?”

  “The Kaleidoscope Theatre.”

  “At the Kaleidoscope! I shall ask Angus.”

  “Please don’t. I — I shall be seriously offended if you do. Let me arrange the business with your aunt. If you really want to see the piece, I suppose you must see it — but not unless your aunt likes.”

  “Dear, dearest, kindest uncle Oliver!” cried Christabel, squeezing his arm. “From my childhood upwards you have always fostered my self-will by the blindest indulgence. I was afraid that, all at once, you were going to be unkind and thwart me.”

  Major Bree was thoughtful and silent for the rest of the afternoon, and although Jessie tried to be as sharp-spoken and vivacious as usual, the effort would have been obvious to any two people properly qualified to observe the actions and expressions of others. But Angus and Christabel, being completely absorbed in each other, saw nothing amiss in their companions.

  The river and the landscape were divine — a river for gods — a wood for nymphs — altogether too lovely for mortals. Tea, served on a little round table in the hotel garden, was perfect.

  “How much nicer than the dinner to-night,” exclaimed Christabel. “I wish we were not going. And yet, it will be very pleasant, I daresay — a table decorated with the loveliest flowers — well-dressed women, clever men, all talking as if there was not a care in life — and perhaps we shall be next each other,” added the happy girl, looking at Angus.

  “What a comfort for me that I am out of it,” said Jessie. “How nice to be an insignificant young woman whom nobody ever dreams of asking to dinner. A powdered old dowager did actually hint at my going to her musical evening the other day when she called in Bolton Row. ‘Be sure you come early,’ she said, gushingly, to Mrs. Tregonell and Christabel; and then, in quite another key, glancing at me, she added, and ‘if Miss — er — er would like to hear my singers I should be — er — delighted,’ no doubt mentally adding, ‘I hope she won’t have the impertinence to take me at my word.’”

  “Jessie, you are the most evil-thinking person I ever knew,” cried Christabel. “I’m sure Lady Millamont meant to be civil.”

  “Yes, but she did not mean me to go to her party,” retorted Jessie.

  The happy days — the society evenings — slipped by — dining — music — dancing. And now came the brief bright season of rustic entertainments — more dancing — more music — lawn-tennis — archery — water parties — every device by which the summer hours may chime in tune with pleasure. It was July — Christabel’s birthday had come and gone, bringing a necklace of single diamonds and a basket of June roses from Angus, and the most perfect thing in Park hacks from Mrs. Tregonell — but Christabel’s wedding-day — more fateful than any birthday except the first — had not yet been fixed — albeit Mr. Hamleigh pressed for a decision upon this vital point.

  “It was to have been at Midsummer,” he said, one day, when he had been discussing the question tête-à-tête with Mrs. Tregonell.

  “Indeed, Angus, I never said that. I told you that Christabel would be twenty at Midsummer, and that I would not consent to the marriage until after then.”

  “Precisely, but surely that meant soon after? I thought we should be married early in July — in time to start for the Tyrol in golden weather.”

  “I never had any fixed date in my mind,” answered Mrs. Tregonell, with a pained look. Struggle with herself as she might, this engagement of Christabel’s was a disappointment and a grief to her. “I thought my son would have returned before now. I should not like the wedding to take place in his absence.”

  “And I should like him to be at the wedding,” said Angus; “but I think it will be rather hard if we have to wait for the caprice of a traveller who, from what Belle tells me of his letters — —”

  “Has Belle shown you any of his letters?” asked Mrs. Tregonell, with a vexed look.

  “No, I don’t think he has written to her, has he?”

  “No, of course not; his letters are always addressed to me. He is a wretched correspondent.”

  “I was going to say, that, from what Belle tells me, your son’s movements appear most uncertain, and it really does not seem worth while to wait.”

  “When the wedding-day is fixed, I will send him a message by the Atlantic cable. We must have him at the wedding.”

  Mr. Hamleigh did not see the necessity; but he was too kind to say so. He pressed for a settlement as to the day — or week — or at least the month in which his marriage was to take place — and at last Mrs. Tregonell consented to the beginning of September. They were all agreed now that the fittest marriage temple for this particular bride and bridegroom was the little old church in the heart of the hills — the church in which Christabel had worshipped every Sunday, morning or afternoon, ever since she could remember. It was Christabel’s own desire to kneel before that familiar altar on her wedding-day — in the solemn peacefulness of that loved hill-side, with friendly honest country faces round her — rather than in the midst of a fashionable crowd, attended by bridesmaids after Gainsborough, and page-boys after Vandyke, in an atmosphere heavy with the scent of Ess Bouquet.

  Mr. Hamleigh had no near relations — and albeit a whole bevy of cousins and a herd of men from the clubs would have gladly attended to witness his excision from the ranks of gilded youth, and to bid him God-speed on his voyage to the domestic haven — their presence at the sacrifice would have given him no pleasure — while, on the other hand, there was one person resident in London whose presence would have caused him acute pain. Thus, each of the lovers pleading for the same favour, Mrs. Tregonell had foregone her idea of a London wedding, and had come to see that it would be very hard upon all the kindly inhabitants of Forrabury and Minster — Boscastle — Trevalga — Bossiney and Trevena — to deprive them of the pleasurable excitement to be derived from Christabel’s wedding.

  Early in September, in the golden light of that lovely time, they were to be quietly married in the dear old church, and then away to Tyrolean woods and hills — scenes which, for Christabel, seemed to be the chosen background of poetry, legend, and romance, rather than an actual country, provided with hotels, and accessible by tourists. O
nce having consented to the naming of an exact time, Mrs. Tregonell felt there could be no withdrawal of her word. She telegraphed to Leonard, who was somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, with a chosen friend, a couple of English servants and three or four Canadians, — and who, were he so minded, could be home in a month — and having despatched this message she felt the last wrench had been endured. Nothing that could ever come afterwards — save death itself — could give her sharper pain.

  “Poor Leonard,” she replied; “it will break his heart.”

  In the years that were gone she had so identified herself with her son’s hopes and schemes, had so projected her thoughts into his future — seeing him in her waking dreams as he would be in the days to come, a model squire, possessed of all his father’s old-fashioned virtues, with a great deal of modern cleverness superadded, a proud and happy husband, the father of a noble race — she had kept this vision of the future in her mind so long, had dwelt upon it so fondly, had coloured it so brightly, that to forego it now, to say to herself “This thing was but a dream which I dreamed, and it can never be realized,” was like relinquishing a part of her own life. She was a deeply religious woman, and if called upon to bear physical pain — to suffer the agonies of a slow, incurable illness — she would have suffered with the patience of a Christian martyr, saying to herself, as brave Dr. Arnold said in the agony of his sudden fatal malady, “Whom He loveth He chasteneth,” — but she could not surrender the day-dream of her life without bitterest repining. In all her love of Christabel, in all her careful education and moral training of the niece to whom she had been as a mother, there had been this leaven of selfishness. She had been rearing a wife for her son — such a wife as would be a man’s better angel — a guiding, restraining, elevating principle, so interwoven with his life that he should never know himself in leading-strings — an influence so gently exercised that he should never suspect that he was influenced.

  “Leonard has a noble heart and a fine manly character,” the mother had often told herself; “but he wants the association of a milder nature than his own. He is just the kind of man to be guided and governed by a good wife — a wife who would obey his lightest wish, and yet rule him always for good.”

  She had seen how, when Leonard had been disposed to act unkindly or illiberally by a tenant, Christabel had been able to persuade him to kindness or generosity — how, when he had set his face against going to church, being minded to devote Sunday morning to the agreeable duty of cleaning a favourite gun, or physicking a favourite spaniel, or greasing a cherished pair of fishing-boots, Christabel had taken him there — how she had softened and toned down his small social discourtesies, checked his tendency to strong language — and, as it were, expurgated, edited, and amended him.

  And having seen and rejoiced in this state of things, it was very hard to be told that another had won the wife she had moulded, after her own fashion, to be the gladness and glory of her son’s life; all the harder because it was her own shortsighted folly which had brought Angus Hamleigh to Mount Royal.

  All through that gay London season — for Christabel a time of unclouded sadness — carking care had been at Mrs. Tregonell’s heart. She tried to be just to the niece whom she dearly loved, and who had so tenderly and fully repaid her affection. Yet she could not help feeling as if Christabel’s choice was a personal injury — nay, almost treachery and ingratitude. “She must have known that I meant her to be my son’s wife,” she said to herself; “yet she takes advantage of my poor boy’s absence, and gives herself to the first comer.”

  “Surely September is soon enough,” she said, pettishly, when Angus pleaded for an earlier date. “You will not have known Christabel for a year, even then. Some men love a girl for half a lifetime before they win her.”

  “But it was not my privilege to know Christabel at the beginning of my life,” replied Angus. “I made the most of my opportunities by loving her the moment I saw her.”

  “It is impossible to be angry with you,” sighed Mrs. Tregonell. “You are so like your father.”

  That was one of the worst hardships of the case. Mrs. Tregonell could not help liking the man who had thwarted the dearest desire of her heart. She could not help admiring him, and making comparisons between him and Leonard — not to the advantage of her son. Had not her first love been given to his father — the girl’s romantic love, ever so much more fervid and intense than any later passion — the love that sees ideal perfection in a lover?

  CHAPTER VII.

  CUPID AND PSYCHE.

  In all the bright June weather, Christabel had been too busy and too happy to remember her caprice about Cupid and Psyche. But just after the Henley week — which to some thousands, and to these two lovers, had been as a dream of bliss — a magical mixture of sunlight and balmy airs and flowery meads, fine gowns and fine luncheons, nigger singers, stone-breaking athletes, gipsy sorceresses, eager to read high fortunes on any hand for half-a-crown, rowing men, racing men, artists, actors, poets, critics, swells — just after the wild excitement of that watery saturnalia, Mr. Hamleigh had occasion to go to the north of Scotland to see an ancient kinswoman of his father — an eccentric maiden aunt — who had stood for him, by proxy, at the baptismal font, and at the same time announced her intention of leaving him her comfortable fortune, together with all those snuff-mulls, quaighs, knives and forks, spoons, and other curiosities of Caledonia, which had been in the family for centuries — provided always that he grew up with a high opinion of Mary Stuart, and religiously believed the casket letters to be the vile forgeries of George Buchanan. The old lady, who was a kindly soul, with a broad Scotch tongue, had an inconvenient habit of sending for her nephew at odd times and seasons, when she imagined herself on the point of death — and he was too kind to turn a deaf ear to this oft-repeated cry of “wolf” — lest, after making light of her summons, he should hear that the real wolf had come and devoured the harmless, affectionate old lady.

  So now, just when London life was at its gayest and brightest, when the moonlit city after midnight looked like fairy-land, and the Thames Embankment, with its long chain of glittering lamps, gleaming golden above the sapphire river, was a scene to dream about, Mr. Hamleigh had to order his portmanteau and a hansom, and drive from the Albany to one of the great railway stations in the Euston Road, and to curl himself up in his corner of the limited mail, scarcely to budge till he was landed at Inverness. It was hard to leave Christabel, though it were only for a week. He swore to her that his absence should not outlast a week, unless the grisly wolf called Death did indeed claim his victim.

  “I know I shall find the dear old soul up and hearty,” he said, lightly, “devouring Scotch collops, or haggis, or cock-a-leeky, or something equally loathsome, and offering me some of that extraordinary soup which she always talks of in the plural. ‘Do have a few more broth, Angus; they’re very good the day.’ But she is a sweet old woman, despite her barbarities, and one of the happiest days of my life will be that on which I take you to see her.”

  “And if — if she is not very ill, you will come back soon, won’t you, Angus,” pleaded Christabel.

  “As soon as ever I can tear myself away from the collops and the few broth. If I find the dear old impostor in rude health, as I quite expect, I will hob and nob with her over one glass of toddy, sleep one night under her roof, and then across the Border as fast as the express will carry me.”

  So they parted; and Angus had scarcely left Bolton Row an hour, when Major Bree came in, and, by some random flight of fancy, Christabel remembered “Cupid and Psyche.”

  The three ladies had just come upstairs after dinner. Mrs. Tregonell was enjoying forty winks in a low capacious chair, near an open window, in the first drawing-room, softly lit by shaded Carcel lamps, scented with tea-roses and stephanotis. Christabel and Jessie were in the tiny third room, where there was only the faint light of a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece. Here the Major found them, when he came creeping in from the fro
nt room, where he had refrained from disturbing Mrs. Tregonell.

  “Auntie is asleep,” said Christabel. “We must talk in subdued murmurs. She looked sadly tired after Mrs. Dulcimer’s garden party.”

  “I ought not to have come so early,” apologized the Major.

  “Yes you ought; we are very glad to have you. It is dreadfully dull without Angus.”

  “What! you begin to miss him already?”

  “Already!” echoed Christabel. “I missed him before the sound of his cab wheels was out of the street. I have been missing him ever since.”

  “Poor little Belle!”

  “And he is not half-way to Scotland yet,” she sighed. “How long and slow the hours will be. You must do all you can to amuse me. I shall want distractions — dissipation even. If we were at home I should go and wander up by Willapark, and talk to the gulls. Here there is nothing to do. Another stupid garden party at Twickenham to-morrow, exactly opposite the one to-day at Richmond — the only variety being that we shall be on the north bank of the river instead of the south bank — a prosy dinner in Regent’s Park the day after. Let me see,” said Christabel, suddenly animated. “We are quite free for to-morrow evening. We can go and see ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ and I can tell Angus all about it when he comes back. Please get us a nice see-able box, like a dear obliging Uncle Oliver, as you are.”

  “Of course I am obliging,” groaned the Major, “but the most obliging person that ever was can’t perform impossibilities. If you want a box at the Kaleidoscope you must engage one for to-morrow month — or to-morrow six weeks. It is a mere bandbox of a theatre, and everybody in London wants to see this farrago of nonsense illustrated by pretty women.”

  “You have seen it, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I dropped in one night with an old naval friend, who had taken a stall for his wife, which she was not able to occupy.”

  “Major Bree, you are a very selfish person,” said Christabel, straightening her slim waist, and drawing herself up with mock dignity. “You have seen this play yourself, and you are artful enough to tell us it is not worth seeing, just to save yourself the trouble of hunting for a box. Uncle Oliver, that is not chivalry. I used to think you were a chivalrous person.”