Mount Royal Volume Iii Part 8

"Well, they're ugly enough even for that; but it's not the right kind of ugliness."

"After all," answered Mopsy, "we have no more chance of paying weekly than we have of paying monthly or quarterly. Nothing under three years'

credit would be any use to _us_. Something might happen--Fortune's wheel might turn in three years."

"Whenever it does turn it will be the wrong way, and we shall be under it," said Dopsy, still given over to gloom.

It was very delightful to be invited to a fine old country house; but it was bitter to know that one must go there but half provided with those things which civilization have made a necessity.

"How happy those South Sea Islanders must be," sighed Mopsy, pensively meditating upon the difference between wearing nothing, and having nothing to wear.

CHAPTER VI.

"I WILL HAVE NO MERCY ON HIM."

The Buenos Ayres steamer was within sight of land--English land. Those s.h.i.+ning lights yonder were the twin lanterns of the Lizard. Leonard and his friend paced the bridge smoking their cigars, and looking towards that double star which shone out as one light in the distance; and thinking that they were going back to civilization--conventional habits--a world which must seem cramped and narrow--not much better than the squirrel's cage seems to the squirrel--after the vast width and margin of that wilder, freer world they had just left--where men and women were not much more civilized than the unbroken horses that were brought out struggling, and roped in among a team of older stagers, to be dragged along anyhow for the first mile or so, rebellious, and wondering, and to fall in with the necessities of the case somehow before the stage was done.

There was no thrill of patriotic rapture in the breast of either traveller as he watched yonder well-known light brightening on the dark horizon. Leonard had left his country too often to feel any deep emotion at returning to it. He had none of those strong feelings which mark a man as the son of the soil, and make it seem to him that he belongs to one spot of earth, and can neither live nor die happily anywhere else.

The entire globe was his country, a world created for him to roam about in, climbing all its hills, shooting in all its forests, fis.h.i.+ng in all its rivers, exhausting all the sport and amus.e.m.e.nt that was to be had out of it--and with no anchor to chain him down to any given spot. Yet, though he had none of the deep feeling of the exile returning to the country of his birth, he was not without emotion as he saw the Lizard light broadening and yellowing under the pale beams of a young moon. He was thinking of his wife--the wife whose face he had not seen since that gloomy morning at Mount Royal, when she sat pale and calm in her place at the head of his table--maintaining her dignity as the mistress of his house, albeit he knew her heart was breaking. From the hour of her return from the Kieve, they had been parted. She had kept her room, guarded by Jessie; and he had been told, significantly, that it was not well they should meet.

How would she receive him now? What were her thoughts and feelings about that dead man? The man whom she had loved and he had hated: not only because his wife loved him--though that reason was strong enough for hatred--but because the man was in every attribute so much his own superior. Never had Leonard Tregonell felt such keen anxiety as he felt now, when he speculated upon his wife's greeting--when he tried to imagine how they two would feel and act standing face to face after nearly a year of severance.

The correspondence between them had been of the slightest. For the first six months his only home-letters had been from Miss Bridgeman--curt, business-like communications--telling him of his boy's health and general progress, and of any details about the estate which it was his place to be told. Of Christabel she wrote as briefly as possible. "Mrs.

Tregonell is a little better." "Mrs. Tregonell is gradually regaining strength." "The doctor considers Mrs. Tregonell much improved," and so on.

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 sh.o.r.e--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 ash.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.es 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed the lodge, and saw all the lights of the old wide-spreading Tudor front s.h.i.+ning 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 Laoc.o.o.n 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 Theatre Francais 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 b.u.t.tons 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 pa.s.sage 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 _litterateur_, who, five seasons ago, had been an object of undisguised detestation with Christabel. He, too, was essentially in the movement--aesthetic, cynical, agnostic, thought-reading, spiritualistic--always blowing the last fas.h.i.+onable 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 paris.h.i.+oners. 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 pa.s.sage," 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, enc.u.mbered 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 a.s.sociated 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 sh.o.r.es of the Amazon, he would have struck a deeper note of pa.s.sion 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.