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 passion – with no assured 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 passionately 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."
"God 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 passage 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 hell."
"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 passionate 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 hoarse 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 Espinasse, Sevigné, Carter – and found in them a grace and a charm that surpassed 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.
"Did he write just such letters to Stella Mayne, I wonder? No; there was no need for writing – they were always together."
The candles on her desk had burnt low by the time her task was done. Faint gleams of morning stole through the striped blinds, as she sealed the packet in which she had folded that lengthy history of Angus Hamleigh's courtship – a large square packet, tied with stout red tape, and sealed in several places. Her hand hardly faltered as she set her seal upon the wax: her purpose was so strong.
"Yes," she said to herself, "I will do what is best and safest for his honour and for mine." And then she knelt by her bed and prayed long and fervently; and remained upon her knees reading the Gospel as the night melted away and the morning sun flooded her room with light.
She did not even attempt to sleep, trusting to her cold bath for strength against the day's ordeal. She thought all the time she was dressing of the task that lay before her – the calm deliberate cancelment of her engagement, with the least possible pain for the man she loved, and for his ultimate gain in this world and the next. Was it not for the welfare of a man's soul that he should do his duty and repair the wrong that he had done; rather than that he should conform to the world's idea of the fitness of things and make an eminently respectable marriage?
Christabel contemplated herself critically in the glass as she brushed her hair. Her eyelids were swollen with weeping – her cheeks pallid, her eyes lustreless, and at this disadvantage she compared herself with that vivid and sylph-like beauty she had seen at the Kaleidoscope.
"How could he ever forget her for my sake?" she thought, looking at that sad colourless face, and falling into the common error that only the most beautiful women are loved with perfect love, that perfection of feeling answers to perfection of form – forgetting how the history of life shows that upon the unlovely also there have been poured treasures of deepest, purest love – that, while beauty charms and wins all, there is often one, best worth the winning, who is to be vanquished by some subtler charm, held by some less obvious chain than Aphrodite's rosy garlands. Perhaps, if Miss Courtenay had been a plain woman, skilled in the art of making the most of small advantages, she would have had more faith in her own power; but being a lovely woman who had been so trained and taught as to think very little of her own beauty, she was all the more ready to acknowledge the superior loveliness of a rival.
"Having worshipped that other fairer face, how could he care for me?" she asked herself; and then, brooding upon every detail of their betrothal, she came to the bitter conclusion that Angus had offered himself to her out of pity – touched by her too obvious affection for him – love which she had hardly tried to hide from him, when once he had told her of his early doom. That storm of pity and regret which had swept over her heart had annihilated her womanly pride: she forgot all that was due to her own dignity, and was only too eager to offer herself as the companion and consoler of his brief days. She looked back and remembered her folly – thinking of herself as a creature caught in a trap.
No, assuredly, there was but one remedy.
One doubt – one frail straw of hope to which she might cling – yet remained. That tried, all was decided. Was this story true – completely and positively a fact? She had heard so much in society about baseless scandals – she had been told so many versions of the same story – as unlike as black to white or false to true – and she was not going to take this one bitter fact for granted upon the strength of any fashionable Medusa who might try to turn her warm beating heart to stone. Before she accepted Medusa's sentence she would discover for herself how far this story was true.
"I will give no one any trouble," she thought: "I will act for myself, and judge for myself. It will be the making or marring of three lives."
In her wide charity, in that power to think and feel for others, which was the highest gift of her rich sweet soul, Stella Mayne seemed to Christabel as important a factor in this life-problem as herself or Angus. She thought of her tenderly, picturing her as a modern Gretchen, tempted by an early and intense love, much more than by the devil's lure of splendour and jewels – a poor little Gretchen at seventeen and sixpence a week, living in a London garret, with no mother to watch and warn, and with wicked old Marthas in plenty to whisper bad advice.
Christabel went down to breakfast as usual. Her quiet face and manner astonished Mrs. Tregonell, who had slept very little better than her niece; but when the servant came in to ask if she would ride she refused.
"Do, dear," pleaded her aunt; "a nice long country ride by Finchley and Hendon would do you good."
"No, Aunt Di – I would rather be at home this morning," answered Christabel; so the man departed, with an order for the carriage at the usual hour in the afternoon.
There was a letter from Angus – Christabel only glanced at the opening lines, which told her that he was to stay at Hillside a few days longer, and then put the letter in her pocket. Jessie Bridgeman looked at her curiously – knowing very well that there was something sorely amiss – but waiting to be told what this sudden cloud of sorrow meant.
Christabel went back to her own room directly after breakfast. Her aunt forbore any attempt at consolation, knowing it was best to let the girl bear her grief in her own way.
"You will go with me for a drive after luncheon, dear?" she asked.
"Yes, Auntie – but I would rather we went a little way in the country, if you don't mind, instead of to the Park."
"With all my heart: I have had quite enough of the Park."
"The 'booing, and booing, and booing,'" said Jessie, "and the straining one's every nerve to see the Princess drive by – only to discover the humiliating fact that she is one of the very few respectable-looking women in the Park – perhaps the only one who can look absolutely respectable without being a dowdy."
"Shall I go to her room and try if I can be of any comfort to her?" mused Jessie, as she went up to her own snug little den on the third floor. "Better not, perhaps. I like to hug my sorrows. I should hate any one who thought their prattle could lessen my pain. She will bear hers best alone, I dare say. But what can it be? Not any quarrel with him. They could hardly quarrel by telegraph or post – they who are all honey when they are together. It is some scandal – something that old demon with the eyebrows said yesterday. I am sure of it – a talk between two elderly women with closed doors always means Satan's own mischief."
All three ladies went out in the carriage after luncheon – a dreary, dusty drive, towards Edgware – past everlasting bricks and mortar, as it seemed to Christabel's tired eyes, which gazed at the houses as if they had been phantoms, so little human meaning had they for her – so little did she realize that in each of those brick and plaster packing-cases human beings lived, and, in their turn, suffered some such heart-agony as this which she was enduring to-day.
"That is St. John's Wood up yonder, isn't it?" she asked, as they passed Carlton Hill, speaking for almost the first time since they left Mayfair.
"Yes."
"Isn't it somewhere about there Miss Stella Mayne lives, the actress we saw the other night?" asked Christabel, carelessly.
Her aunt looked at her with intense surprise, – how could she pronounce that name, and to ask a frivolous question?
"Yes; she has a lovely house called the Rosary. Mr. FitzPelham told me about it," answered Jessie.
Christabel said never a word more as the carriage rolled on by Cricklewood and the two Welsh Harps, and turned into the quiet lanes about Hendon, and so home by the Finchley Road. She had found out what she wanted to know.
When afternoon tea was served in the little third drawing-room, where Mrs. Tregonell sat resting herself after the dust and weariness of the drive, Christabel was missing. Dormer brought a little note for her mistress.
"Miss Courtenay gave me this just before she went out, ma'am."
"Out! Has Miss Courtenay gone out?"
"Yes, ma'am; Daniel got her a cab five minutes ago."
"To her dressmaker, I suppose," said Mrs. Tregonell, trying to look indifferent.
"Don't be uneasy about me, Auntie," wrote Christabel: "I am going on an errand about which I made up my mind last night. I may be a little late for dinner – but as I shall go and return in the same cab, you may feel sure that I shall be quite safe. Don't wait dinner for me."
CHAPTER IX
"LOVE IS LOVE FOR EVERMORE."
The Rosary, St. John's Wood: that was the address which Christabel had given the cabman. Had any less distinguished person than Stella Mayne lived at the Rosary it might have taken the cabman all the evening to find that particular house, with no more detailed address as to road and number. But a brother whip on a rank near Hamilton Terrace was able to tell Christabel's cabman the way to the Rosary. It was a house at which hansoms were often wanted at unholy hours between midnight and sunrise – a house whose chief hospitality took the form of chablis and oysters after the play – a house which seldom questioned poor cabby's claim or went closely into mileage – a house which deserved and commanded respectful mention on the rank.
"The Rosary – yes, that's where Miss Mayne lives. Beech Tree Road – a low 'ouse with veranders all round – yer can't miss it."
The cabman rattled away to Grove End Road, and thence to the superior quietude and seclusion of Beech Tree Road, where he drew up at a house with a glazed entrance. He rang the bell, and Christabel alighted before the summons was answered.
"Is Miss Mayne at home?" she asked a servant in plain clothes – a servant of unquestionable respectability.
"Yes, ma'am," he replied, and preceded her along a corridor, glass-roofed, richly carpeted, and with a bank of hot-house flowers on either side.
Only at this ultimate moment did Christabel's courage begin to falter. She felt as if she were perhaps entering a den of vice. Innocent, guileless as she was, she had her own vague ideas about vice – exaggerated as all ignorant ideas are apt to be. She began to shiver as she walked over the dark subdued velvet pile of that shadowy corridor. If she had found Miss Mayne engaged in giving a masked ball – or last night's supper party only just finishing – or a party of young men playing blind hookey, she would hardly have been surprised – not that she knew anything about masked balls – or late suppers – or gambling – but that all these would have come within her vague notions of an evil life.
"He loved her," she said to herself, arguing against this new terror, "and he could not love a thoroughly wicked woman."
No, the Gretchen idea – purity fallen, simplicity led astray – was more natural – but one could hardly imagine Gretchen in a house of this kind – this subdued splendour – this all-pervading air of wealth and luxury.
Miss Courtenay was shown into a small morning-room – a room which on one side was all window – opening on to a garden, where some fine old trees gave an idea of space – and where the foreground showed a mass of flowers – roses – roses – roses everywhere – trailing over arches – clustering round tall iron rods – bush roses – standard roses – dwarf roses – all shining in the golden light of a westering sun.
The room was elegantly simple – an escritoire in the Sherraton style – two or three book-tables crowded with small volumes in exquisite binding, vellum, creamy calf, brown Russia, red edges, gold edges, painted edges, all the prettinesses of bookbinding – half a dozen low chairs – downy nests covered with soft tawny Indian silk, with here and there a brighter patch of colour in the shape of a plush pillow or an old brocade anti-macassar – voluminous curtains of the same soft tawny silk, embroidered with poppies and corn-flowers – a few choice flowers in old Venetian vases – a large peacock-feather fan thrown beside an open book, upon a low pillow-shaped ottoman.
Christabel gazed round the room in blank surprise – nothing gaudy – nothing vulgar – nothing that indicated sudden promotion from the garret to the drawing-room – an air of elegant luxury, of supreme fashion in all things – but no glare of gilding, no discords in form or colour.
"Your name, if you please, madam?" said the servant, a model of decorum in well-brushed black.
"Perhaps, you had better take my card. I am not personally known to Miss Mayne," answered Christabel, opening her card-case. "Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, as with a cry of pain.
"I beg your pardon," said the servant, alarmed.
"It's nothing. A picture startled me – that was all. Be good enough to tell Miss Mayne that I shall be very much obliged to her if she will see me."
"Certainly, madam!" said the man, as he retired with the card, wondering how a young lady of such distinguished appearance happened to call upon his mistress, whose feminine visitors were usually of a more marked type.
"I dare say she's collectin' funds for one of their everlastin' churches," thought the butler, "'igh, low, or Jack, as I call 'em – 'igh church, low church, or John Wesley – ever so many predominations, and all of 'em equally keen after money. But why did she almost s'riek when she clapt her eyes on Mr. 'Amleigh's portrait, I wonder, just as if she had seen a scorpiont."
Christabel stood motionless where the man left her, looking at a photograph on a brass easel upon an old ebony table in the middle of the room. A cluster of stephanotis in a low Venetian vase stood in front of that portrait, like flowers before a shrine. It was an exquisitely painted photograph of Angus Hamleigh – Angus at his best and brightest, before the flush and glory of youth had faded from eyes and brow – Angus with a vivacity of expression which she had never seen in his face – she who had known him only since the fatal hereditary disease had set its mark upon him.
"Ah!" she sighed, "he was happier when he loved her than he ever was with me."
She stood gazing at that pictured face, her hands clasped, her heart beating heavily. Everything confirmed her in her despair – in her iron resolve. At last, with a long-drawn sigh, she withdrew her eyes from the picture, and began to explore the room. No, there was no trace of vulgarity – no ugly indication of a vicious mind. Christabel glanced at the open book on the ottoman, half expecting to find the trail of the serpent there – in some shameful French novel, the very name of which she had not been allowed to hear. But the book was only the last Contemporary Review, open at an article of Gladstone's. Then, with faintly tremulous hand, she took one of the vellum-bound duodecimos from a shelf of the revolving book-table – "Selections from Shelley" – and on the title-page, "Angus to Stella, Rome," and a date, just three years old, in the hand she knew so well. She looked in other books – all choicest flowers of literature – and in each there was the same familiar penmanship, sometimes with a brief sentence that made the book a souvenir– sometimes with a passionate line from Shakespeare or Dante, Heine or De Musset. Christabel remembered, with a sharp pang of jealousy, that her lover had never so written in any book he had given her. She ignored the change which a year or two may make in a man's character, when he has reached one of the turning points of life; and how a graver deeper phase of feeling, less eager to express itself in other people's flowery language, succeeds youth's fervid sentiment. Had Werther lived and loved a second Charlotte, assuredly he would have loved her after a wiser and graver fashion. But Christabel had believed herself her lover's first and only love, and finding that she was but the second volume in his life, abandoned herself at once to despair.
She sank into one of the low luxurious chairs, just as the door opened, and Miss Mayne came into the room.
If she had looked lovely as Psyche, in her classic drapery, with the emerald butterfly on her shoulder, she looked no less beautiful in the costly-simplicity of her home toilet. She wore a sacque-shaped tea-gown of soft French-grey silk, lined with palest pink satin, over a petticoat that seemed a mass of cream-coloured lace. Her only ornaments were three half-hoop rings – rubies, diamonds, and sapphires – too large for the slender third finger of her left hand, and half concealing a thin wedding-ring – and a star-shaped brooch – one large cat's-eye with diamond rays, which fastened the lace handkerchief at her throat.
Christabel, quick to observe the woman whose existence had ruined her life, noted everything, from the small perfectly-shaped head – shaped for beauty rather than mental power – to the little arched foot in its pearl-coloured silk stocking, and grey satin slipper. For the first time in her life she beheld a woman whose chief business in this world was to look her loveliest, at all times and seasons, for friend or foe – for whom the perfection of costume was the study and delight of life – who lived and reigned by the divine right of beauty.
"Pray sit down!" said Miss Mayne, with a careless wave of her hand – so small – so delicate and fragile-looking under the lace ruffle; "I am quite at a loss to guess to what I am indebted for the honour of this visit."
She looked at her visitor scrutinizingly with those dark, too lustrous eyes. A hectic flush burned in her hollow cheeks. She had heard a good deal about this Miss Courtenay, of Mount Royal and Mayfair, and she came prepared to do battle.
For some moments Christabel was dumb. It was one thing to have come into this young lioness's den, and another thing to know what to say to the lioness. But the straightness and purity of the girl's purpose upheld her – and her courage hardly faltered.
"I have come to you, Miss Mayne, because I will not consent to be governed by common report. I want to know the truth – the whole truth – however bitter it may be for me – in order that I may know how to act."
Miss Mayne had expected a much sharper mode of attack. She had been prepared to hear herself called scorpion – or viper – the pest of society – a form of address to which she would have been able to reply with a startling sharpness. But to be spoken to thus – gravely, gently, pleadingly, and with that sweet girlish face looking at her in unspeakable sorrow – was something for which she had not prepared herself.
"You speak to me like a lady – like a good woman," she said, falteringly. "What is it you want to know?"
"I have been told that Mr. Hamleigh – Angus Hamleigh – was once your lover. Is that true?"
"True as the stars in heaven – the stars by which we swore to love each other to the end of our lives – looking up at them, with our hands clasped, as we stood on the deck of the steamer between Dover and Calais. That was our marriage. I used to think that God saw it, and accepted it – just as if we had been in church: only it did not hold water, you see," she added, with a cynical laugh, which ended in a hard little cough.
"He loved you dearly. I can see that by the lines that he wrote in your books. I ventured to look at them while I waited for you. Why did he not marry you?"
Stella Mayne shrugged her shoulders, and played with the soft lace of her fichu.
"It is not the fashion to marry a girl who dances in short petticoats, and lives in an attic," she answered. "Perhaps such a girl might make a good wife, if a man had the courage to try the experiment. Such things have been done, I believe; but most men prefer the safer course. If I had been clever, I daresay Mr. Hamleigh would have married me; but I was an ignorant little fool – and when he came across my path he seemed to me like an angel of light. I simply worshipped him. You've no idea how innocent I was in those days. Not a carefully educated, lady-like innocence, like yours, don't you know, but absolute ignorance. I didn't know any wrong; but then I didn't know any right. You see I am quite candid with you."
"I thank you with all my heart for your truthfulness. Everything – for you, for me, for Angus – depends upon our perfect truthfulness. I want to do what is best – what is wisest – what is right – not for myself only, but for Angus, for you."
Those lovely liquid eyes looked at her incredulously.
"What," cried Stella Mayne, with her mocking little laugh – a musical little laugh trained for comedy, and unconsciously artificial – "do you mean to tell me that you care a straw what becomes of me – that it matters to you whether I die in the gutter where I was born, or pitch myself into the Regent's Canal some night when I have a fit of the blue devils?"