Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “She has forgotten me. She is happy in her married life,” he said to himself, and then he looked to the other end of the table where Leonard sat, burly, florid, black-haired, mutton-chop whiskered, the very essence of Philistinism—”happy — with him.”

  “And I am sure you must adore Ellen Terry,” said Dopsy, whose society-conversation was not a many-stringed instrument.

  “Who could live and not worship her?” ejaculated Mr. Hamleigh.

  “Irving as Shylock!” sighed Dopsy.

  “Miss Terry as Portia,” retorted Angus.

  “Unutterably sweet, was she not?”

  “Her movements were like a sonata by Beethoven — her gowns were the essence of all that Rubens and Vandyck ever painted.”

  “I knew you would agree with me,” exclaimed Dopsy. “And do you think her pretty?”

  “Pretty is not the word. She is simply divine. Greuze might have painted her — there is no living painter whose palette holds the tint of those blue eyes.”

  Dopsy began to giggle softly to herself, and to flutter her fan with maiden modesty.

  “I hardly like to mention it after what you have said,” she murmured, “but — —”

  “Pray be explicit.”

  “I have been told that I am rather” — another faint giggle and another flutter—”like Miss Terry.”

  “I never met a fair-haired girl yet who had not been told as much,” answered Mr. Hamleigh coolly.

  Dopsy turned crimson, and felt that this particular arrow had missed the gold. Mr. Hamleigh was not quite so easy to get on with as her hopeful fancy had painted him.

  After dinner there was some music, in which art neither of the Miss Vandeleurs excelled. Indeed, their time had been too closely absorbed by the ever pressing necessity for cutting and contriving to allow of the study of art and literature. They knew the names of writers, and the outsides of books, and they adored the opera, and enjoyed a ballad concert, if the singers were popular, and the audience well dressed; and this was the limit of their artistic proclivities. They sat stifling their yawns, and longing for an adjournment to the billiard room — whither Jack Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu had departed — while Christabel played a capriccio by Mendelssohn. Mr. Hamleigh sat by the piano listening to every note. Leonard and Major Bree lounged by the fireplace, Jessie Bridgeman sitting near them, absorbed in her crewel work.

  It was what Mopsy and Dopsy called a very “slow” evening, despite the new interest afforded by Mr. Hamleigh’s presence. He was very handsome, very elegant, with an inexpressible something in his style and air which Mopsy thought poetical. But it was weary work to sit and gaze at him as if he were a statue, and that long capriccio, with a little Beethoven to follow, and a good deal of Mozart after that, occupied the best part of the evening. To the ears of Mop and Dop it was all tweedledum and tweedledee. They would have been refreshed by one of those lively melodies in which Miss Farren so excels; they would have welcomed a familiar strain from Chilperic or Madame Angot. Yet they gushed and said, “too delicious — quite too utterly lovely,” when Mrs. Tregonell rose from the piano.

  “I only hope I have not wearied everybody,” she said.

  Leonard and Major Bree had been talking local politics all the time, and both expressed themselves much gratified by the music. Mr. Hamleigh murmured his thanks.

  Christabel went to her room wondering that the evening had passed so calmly — that her heart — though it had ached at the change in Angus Hamleigh’s looks, had been in no wise tumultuously stirred by his presence. There had been a peaceful feeling in her mind rather than agitation. She had been soothed and made happy by his society. If love still lingered in her breast it was love purified of every earthly thought and hope. She told herself sorrowfully that for him the sand ran low in the glass of earthly time, and it was sweet to have him near her for a little while towards the end; to be able to talk to him of serious things — to inspire hope in a soul whose natural bent was despondency. It would be sadly, unutterably sweet to talk to him of that spiritual world whose unearthly light already shone in the too brilliant eye, and coloured the hollow cheek. She had found Mr. Hamleigh despondent and sceptical, but never indifferent to religion. He was not one of that eminently practical school which, in the words of Matthew Arnold, thinks it more important to learn how buttons and papier-mâché are made than to search the depths of conscience, or fathom the mysteries of a Divine Providence.

  Christabel’s first sentiment when Leonard announced Mr. Hamleigh’s intended visit had been horror. How could they two who had loved so deeply, parted so sadly, live together under the same roof as if they were every day friends? The thing seemed fraught with danger, impossible for peace. But when she remembered that calm, almost solemn look with which he had shaken hands with her among the graves at Tintagel, it seemed to her that friendship — calmest, purest, most unselfish attachment — was still possible between them. She thought so even more hopefully on the morning after Mr. Hamleigh’s arrival, when he took her boy in his arms, and pressed his lips lovingly upon the bright baby brow.

  “You are fond of children,” exclaimed Mopsy, prepared to gush.

  “Very fond of some children,” he answered gravely. “I shall be very fond of this boy, if he will let me.”

  “Leo is such a darling — and he takes to you already,” said Mopsy, seeing that the child graciously accepted Mr. Hamleigh’s attentions, and even murmured an approving “gur” — followed by a simple one-part melody of gurgling noises — but whether in approval of the gentlemen himself or of his watch-chain, about which the pink flexible fingers had wound themselves, was an open question.

  This was in the hall after breakfast, on a bright sunshiny morning — doors and windows open, and the gardens outside all abloom with chrysanthemums and scarlet geraniums; the gentlemen of the party standing about with their guns ready to start. Mopsy and Dopsy were dressed in home-made gowns of dark brown serge which simulated the masculine simplicity of tailor-made garments. They wore coquettish little toques of the same dark brown stuff, also home-made — and surely, if a virtuous man contending with calamity is a spectacle meet for the gods to admire a needy young woman making her own raiment is at least worthy of human approval.

  “You are coming with us, aren’t you, Hamleigh,” asked Leonard, seeing Angus still occupied with the child.

  “No, thanks; I don’t feel in good form for woodcock shooting. My cough was rather troublesome last night.”

  Mopsy and Dopsy looked at each other despairingly. Here was a golden opportunity lost. If it were only possible to sprain an ankle on the instant.

  Jack Vandeleur was a good brother — so long as fraternal kindness did not cost money — and he saw that look of blank despair in poor Dopsy’s eyes and lips.

  “I think Mr. Hamleigh is wise,” he said. “This bright morning will end in broken weather. Hadn’t you two girls better stay at home? The rain will spoil your gowns.”

  “Our gowns won’t hurt,” said Mopsy brightening. “But do you really think there will be rain? We had so set our hearts on going with you; but it is rather miserable to be out on those hills in a blinding rain. One might walk over the edge of a cliff.”

  “Keep on the safe side and stay at home,” said Leonard, with that air of rough good nature which is such an excellent excuse for bad manners. “Come Ponto, come Juno, hi Delia,” this to the lovely lemon and white spaniels, fawning upon him with mute affection.

  “I think we may as well give it up,” said Dopsy, “we shall be a nuisance to the shooters if it rains.”

  So they stayed, and beguiled Mr. Hamleigh to the billiard room, where they both played against him, and were beaten — after which Mopsy entreated him to give her a lesson in the art, declaring that he played divinely — in such a quite style — so very superior to Jack’s or Mr. Tregonell’s, though both those gentlemen were good players. Angus consented, kindly enough, and gave both ladies the most careful instruction in the art of making pockets a
nd cannons; but he was wondering all the while how Christabel was spending her morning, and thinking how sweet it would have been to have strolled with her across the hills to the quiet little church in the dingle where he had once dreamed they two might be married.

  “I was a fool to submit to delay,” he thought, remembering all the pain and madness of the past. “If I had insisted on being married here — and at once — how happy — oh God! — how happy we might have been. Well, it matters little, now that the road is so near the end. I suppose the dismal close would have come just as soon if my way of life had been strewed with flowers.”

  It was luncheon-time before the Miss Vandeleurs consented to release him. Once having got him in their clutch he was as firmly held as if he had been caught by an octopus. Christabel wondered a little that Angus Hamleigh should find amusement for his morning in the billiard room, and in such society.

  “Perhaps, after all, the Miss Vandeleurs are the kind of girls whom all gentlemen admire,” she said to Jessie. “I know I thought it odd that Leonard should admire them; but you see Mr. Hamleigh is equally pleased with them.”

  “Mr. Hamleigh is nothing of the kind,” answered Jessie in her usual decided way. “But Dop is setting her cap at him in a positively disgraceful manner — even for Dop.”

  “Pray don’t call her by that horrid name.”

  “Why not; it is what her brother and sister call her, and it expresses her so exactly.”

  Mr. Hamleigh and the two damsels now appeared, summoned by the gong, and they all went into the dining-room. It was quite a merry luncheon party. Care seemed to have no part in that cheery circle. Angus had made up his mind to be happy, and Christabel was as much at ease with him as she had been in those innocent, unconscious days when he first came to Mount Royal. Dopsy was in high spirits, thinking that she was fast advancing towards victory. Mr. Hamleigh had been so kind, so attentive, had done exactly what she had asked him to do, and how could she doubt that he had consulted his own pleasure in so doing. Poor Dopsy was accustomed to be treated with scant ceremony by her brother’s acquaintance, and it did not enter into her mind that a man might be bored by her society, and not betray his weariness.

  After luncheon Jessie, who was always energetic, suggested a walk.

  The threatened bad weather had not come: it was a greyish afternoon, sunless but mild.

  “If we walk towards St. Nectan’s Kieve, we may meet the shooters,” said Christabel. “That is a great place for woodcock.”

  “That will be delicious!” exclaimed Dopsy. “I worship St. Nectan’s Kieve. Such a lovely ferny, rocky, wild, watery spot.” And away she and her sister skipped, to put on the brown toques, and to refresh themselves with a powder puff.

  They started for their ramble with Randie, and a favourite Clumber spaniel, degraded from his proud position as a sporting dog, to the ignoble luxury of a house pet, on account of an incorrigible desultoriness in his conduct with birds.

  These affectionate creatures frisked round Christabel, while Miss Vandeleur and her sister seemed almost as friskily to surround Mr. Hamleigh with their South Belgravian blandishments.

  “You look as if you were not very strong,” hazarded Dopsy, sympathetically. “Are you not afraid of a long walk?”

  “Not at all; I never feel better than when walking on these hills,” answered Angus. “It is almost my native air, you see. I came here to get a stock of rude health before I go to winter in the South.”

  “And you are really going to be abroad all the winter?” sighed Dopsy, as if she would have said, “How shall I bear my life in your absence.”

  “Yes, it is five years since I spent a winter in England. I hold my life on that condition. I am never to know the luxury of a London fog, or see a Drury Lane pantomime, or skate upon the Serpentine. A case of real distress, is it not?”

  “Very sad — for your friends,” said Dopsy; “but I can quite imagine that you love the sunny South. How I long to see the Mediterranean — the mountains — the pine-trees — the border-land of Italy.”

  “No doubt you will go there some day — and be disappointed. People generally are when they indulge in day-dreams about a place.”

  “My dreams will always be dreams,” answered Dopsy, with a profound sigh: “we are not rich enough to travel.”

  Christabel walked on in front with Jessie and the dogs. Mr. Hamleigh was longing to be by her side — to talk as they had talked of old — of a thousand things which could be safely discussed without any personal feeling. They had so many sympathies, so many ideas in common. All the world of sense and sentiment was theirs wherein to range at will. But Dopsy and Mopsy stuck to him like burs; plying him with idle questions, and stereotyped remarks, looking at him with languishing eyes.

  He was too much a gentleman, had too much good feeling to be rude to them — but he was bored excessively.

  They went by the cliffs — a wild grand walk. The wide Atlantic spread its dull leaden-coloured waves before them under the grey sky — touched with none of those translucent azures and carmines which so often beautify that western sea. They crossed a bit of hillocky common, and then went down to look at a slate quarry under the cliff — a scene of uncanny grandeur — grey and wild and desolate.

  Dopsy and Mopsy gushed and laughed and declared it was just the scene for a murder, or a duel, or something dreadful and dramatic. The dogs ran into all manner of perilous places, and had to be called away from the verge of instant death.

  “Are you fond of aristocratic society. Miss Vandeleur?” asked Angus.

  Mopsy pleaded guilty to a prejudice in favour of the Upper Ten.

  “Then allow me to tell you that you were never in the company of so many duchesses and countesses in your life as you are at this moment.”

  Mopsy looked mystified, until Miss Bridgeman explained that these were the names given to slates of particular sizes, great stacks of which stood on either side of them ready for shipment.

  “How absurd,” exclaimed Mopsy.

  “Everything must have a name, even the slate that roofs your scullery.”

  From the quarry they strolled across the fields to the high road, and the gate of the farm which contains within its boundary the wonderful waterfall called St. Nectan’s Kieve.

  They met the sportsmen coming out of the hollow with well-filled game-bags.

  Leonard was in high spirits.

  “So you’ve all come to meet us,” he said, looking at his wife, and from his wife to Angus Hamleigh, with a keen, quick glance, too swift to be remarkable. “Uncommonly good of you. We are going to have a grand year for woodcock, I believe — like the season of 1855, when a farmer at St. Buryan shot fifty-four in one week.”

  “Poor dear little birds!” sighed Mopsy; “I feel so sorry for them.”

  “But that doesn’t prevent your eating them, with breadcrumbs and gravy,” said Leonard, laughing.

  “When they are once roasted, it can make no difference who eats them,” replied Mopsy; “but I am intensely sorry for them all the same.”

  They all went home together, a cheery procession, with the dogs at their heels. Mr. Hamleigh’s efforts to escape from the two damsels who had marked him for their own, were futile: nothing less than sheer brutality would have set him free. They trudged along gaily, one on each side of him; they flattered him, they made much of him — a man must have been stony-hearted to remain untouched by such attentions. Angus was marble, but he could not be uncivil. It was his nature to be gentle to women. Mop and Dop were the kind of girls he most detested — indeed, it seemed to him that no other form of girlhood could be so detestable. They had all the pertness of Bohemia without any of its wit — they had all the audacity of the demi-monde, with far inferior attractions. Everything about them was spurious and second-hand — every air and look and tone was put on, like a ribbon or a flower, to attract attention. And could it be that one of these meretricious creatures was angling for him — for him, the Lauzun, the d’Eckmühl, the Prin
ce de Belgioso, of his day — the born dandy, with whom fastidiousness was a sixth sense? Intolerable as the idea of being so pursued was to him, Angus Hamleigh could not bring himself to be rude to a woman.

  It happened, therefore, that from the beginning to the end of that long ramble, he was never in Mrs. Tregonell’s society. She and Jessie walked steadily ahead with their dogs, while the sportsmen tramped slowly behind Mr. Hamleigh and the two girls.

  “Our friend seems to be very much taken by your sisters,” said Leonard to Captain Vandeleur.

  “My sisters are deuced taking girls,” answered Jack, puffing at his seventeenth cigarette; “though I suppose it isn’t my business to say so. There’s nothing of the professional beauty about either of ‘em.”

  “Distinctly not!” said Leonard.

  “But they’ve plenty of chic — plenty of go — savoir faire — and all that kind of thing, don’t you know. They’re the most companionable girls I ever met with!”

  “They’re uncommonly jolly little buffers!” said Leonard, kindly, meaning it for the highest praise.

  “They’ve no fool’s flesh about them,” said Jack; “and they can make a fiver go further than any one I know. A man might do worse than marry one of them.”

  “Hardly!” thought Leonard, “unless he married both.”

  “It would be a fine thing for Dop if Mr. Hamleigh were to come to the scratch,” mused Jack.

  “I wonder what was Leonard’s motive in asking Mr. Hamleigh to stay at Mount Royal?” said Christabel, suddenly, after she and Jessie had been talking of indifferent subjects.

  “I hope he had not any motive, but that the invitation was the impulse of the moment, without rhyme or reason,” answered Miss Bridgeman.

  “Why?”

  “Because if he had a motive, I don’t think it could be a good one.”