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Just so much for Jessie Bridgeman's history as she walks by Major Bree's side in the sunlight, with a sharply cut face, impressed with a gravity beyond her years, and marked with precocious lines that were drawn there by the iron hand of poverty before she had emerged from girlhood. Of late, even amidst the elegant luxuries of May Fair, in a life given over to amusement, among flowers and bright scenery, and music and pictures, those lines had been growing deeper – lines that hinted at a secret care.
"Isn't it delightful to see them together!" said the Major, looking after those happy lovers with a benevolent smile.
"Yes; I suppose it is very beautiful to see such perfect happiness, like Juan and Haidée before Lambro swooped down upon them," returned Miss Bridgeman, who was too outspoken to be ashamed of having read Byron's epic.
Major Bree had old-fashioned notions about the books women should and should not read, and Byron, except for elegant extracts, was in his Index expurgatorius. If a woman was allowed to read the "Giaour," she would inevitably read "Don Juan," he argued; there would be no restraining her, after she had tasted blood – no use in offering her another poet, and saying, Now you can read "Thalaba," or "Peter Bell."
"They were so happy!" said Jessie dreamily, "so young, and one so innocent; and then came fear, severance, despair, and death for the innocent sinner. It is a terrible story!"
"Fortunately, there is no tyrannical father in this case," replied the cheerful Major. "Everybody is pleased with the engagement – everything smiles upon the lovers."
"No, it is all sunshine," said Jessie; "there is no shadow, if – if Mr. Hamleigh is as worthy of his betrothed as we have all agreed to think him. Yet there was a time when you spoke rather disparagingly of him."
"My gossiping old tongue should be cut out for repeating club scandals! Hamleigh is a generous-hearted, noble-natured fellow, and I am not afraid to trust him with the fate of a girl whom I love almost as well as if she were my own daughter. I don't know whether all men love their daughters, by-the-by. There are daughters and daughters – I have seen some that it would be tough work to love. But for Christabel my affection is really parental. I have seen her bud and blossom, a beautiful living flower, a rose in the garden of life."
"And you think Mr. Hamleigh is worthy of her?" said Miss Bridgeman, looking at him searchingly with her shrewd grey eyes, "in spite of what you heard at the clubs?"
"A fico for what I heard at the clubs!" exclaimed the Major, blowing the slander away from the tips of his fingers as if it had been thistledown. "Every man has a past, and every man outlives it. The present and the future are what we have to consider. It is not a man's history, but the man himself, that concerns us; and I say that Angus Hamleigh is a good man, a right-meaning man, a brave and generous man. If a man is to be judged by his history, where would David be, I should like to know? and yet David was the chosen of the Lord!" added the Major, conclusively.
"I hope," said Jessie, earnestly, with vague visions of intrigue and murder conjured up in her mind, "that Mr. Hamleigh was never as bad as David."
"No, no," murmured the Major, "the circumstances of modern times are so different, don't you see? – an advanced civilization – a greater respect for human life. Napoleon the First did a good many queer things; but you would not get a monarch and a commander-in-chief to act as David and Joab acted now-a-days. Public opinion would be too strong for them. They would be afraid of the newspapers."
"Was it anything very dreadful that you heard at the clubs three years ago?" asked Jessie, still hovering about a forbidden theme, with a morbid curiosity strange in one whose acts and thoughts were for the most part ruled by common sense.
The Major, who would not allow a woman to read "Don Juan," had his own ideas of what ought and ought not to be told to a woman.
"My dear Miss Bridgeman," he said, "I would not for worlds pollute your ears with the ribald trash men talk in a club smoking-room. Let it suffice for you to know that I believe in Angus Hamleigh, although I have taken the trouble to make myself acquainted with the follies of his youth."
They walked on in silence for a little while after this, and then the Major said, in a voice full of kindness:
"I think you went to see your own people yesterday, did you not?"
"Yes; Mrs. Tregonell was kind enough to give me a morning, and I spent it with my mother and sisters."
The Major had questioned her more than once about her home, in a way which indicated so kindly an interest that it could not possibly be mistaken for idle curiosity. And she had told him, with perfect frankness, what manner of people her family were – in no wise hesitating to admit their narrow means, and the necessity that she should earn her own living.
"I hope you found them well and happy."
"I thought my mother looked thin and weary. The girls were wonderfully well – great hearty, overgrown creatures! I felt myself a wretched little shrimp among them. As for happiness – well, they are as happy as people can expect to be who are very poor!"
"Do you really think poverty is incompatible with happiness?" asked the Major, with a philosophical air; "I have had a particularly happy life, and I have never been rich."
"Ah, that makes all the difference!" exclaimed Jessie. "You have never been rich, but they have always been poor. You can't conceive what a gulf lies between those two positions. You have been obliged to deny yourself a great many of the mere idle luxuries of life, I dare say – hunters, the latest improvements in guns, valuable dogs, continental travelling; but you have had enough for all the needful things – for neatness, cleanliness, an orderly household; a well-kept flower-garden, everything spotless and bright about you; no slipshod maid-of-all-work printing her greasy thumb upon your dishes – nothing out at elbows. Your house is small, but of its kind it is perfection; and your garden – well, if I had such a garden in such a situation I would not envy Eve the Eden she lost."
"Is that really your opinion?" cried the enraptured soldier; "or are you saying this just to please me – to reconcile me to my jog-trot life, my modest surroundings?"
"I mean every word I say."
"Then it is in your power to make me richer in happiness than Rothschild or Baring. Dearest Miss Bridgeman, dearest Jessie, I think you must know how devotedly I love you! Till to-day I have not dared to speak, for my limited means would not have allowed me to maintain a wife as the woman I love ought to be maintained; but this morning's post brought me the news of the death of an old Admiral of the Blue, who was my father's first cousin. He was a bachelor like myself – left the Navy soon after the signing of Sir Henry Pottinger's treaty at Nankin in '42 – never considered himself well enough off to marry, but lived in a lodging at Devonport, and hoarded and hoarded and hoarded for the mere abstract pleasure of accumulating his surplus income; and the result of his hoarding – combined with a little dodging of his investments in stocks and shares – is, that he leaves me a solid four hundred a year in Great Westerns. It is not much from some people's point of view, but, added to my existing income, it makes me very comfortable. I could afford to indulge all your simple wishes, my dearest! I could afford to help your family!"
He took her hand. She did not draw it away, but pressed his gently, with the grasp of friendship.
"Don't say one word more – you are too good – you are the best and kindest man I have ever known!" she said, "and I shall love and honour you all my life; but I shall never marry! I made up my mind about that, oh! ever so long ago. Indeed, I never expected to be asked, if the truth must be told."
"I understand," said the Major, terribly dashed. "I am too old. Don't suppose that I have not thought about that. I have. But I fancied the difficulty might be got over. You are so different from the common run of girls – so staid, so sensible, of such a contented disposition. But I was a fool to suppose that any girl of – "
"Seven-and-twenty," interrupted Jessie; "it is a long way up the hill of girlhood. I shall soon be going down on the other side."
"At any rate, you are more than twenty years my junior. I was a fool to forget that."
"Dear Major Bree," said Jessie, very earnestly, "believe me, it is not for that reason, I say No. If you were as young – as young as Mr. Hamleigh – the answer would be just the same. I shall never marry. There is no one, prince or peasant, whom I care to marry. You are much too good a man to be married for the sake of a happy home, for status in the world, kindly companionship – all of which you could give me. If I loved you as you ought to be loved I would answer proudly, Yes; but I honour you too much to give you half love."
"Perhaps you do not know with how little I could be satisfied," urged the Major, opposing what he imagined to be a romantic scruple with the shrewd common-sense of his fifty years' experience. "I want a friend, a companion, a helpmate, and I am sure you could be all those to me. If I could only make you happy!"
"You could not!" interrupted Jessie, with cruel decisiveness. "Pray, never speak of this again, dear Major Bree. Your friendship has been very pleasant to me; it has been one of the many charms of my life at Mount Royal. I would not lose it for the world. And we can always be friends, if you will only remember that I have made up my mind – irrevocably – never to marry."
"I must needs obey you," said the Major, deeply disappointed, but too unselfish to be angry. "I will not be importunate. Yet one word I must say. Your future – if you do not marry – what is that to be? Of course, so long as Mrs. Tregonell lives, your home will be at Mount Royal – but I fear that does not settle the question for long. My dear friend does not appear to me a long-lived woman. I have seen traces of premature decay. When Christabel is married, and Mrs. Tregonell is dead, where is your home to be?"
"Providence will find me one," answered Jessie, cheerfully. "Providence is wonderfully kind to plain little spinsters with a knack of making themselves useful. I have been doing my best to educate myself ever since I have been at Mount Royal. It is so easy to improve one's mind when there are no daily worries about the tax-gatherer and the milkman – and when I am called upon to seek a new home, I can go out as a governess – and drink the cup of life as it is mixed for governesses – as Charlotte Brontë says. Perhaps I shall write a novel, as she did, although I have not her genius."
"I would not be sure of that," said the Major. "I believe there is some kind of internal fire burning you up, although you are outwardly so quiet. I think it would have been your salvation to accept the jog-trot life and peaceful home I have offered you."
"Very likely," replied Jessie, with a shrug and a sigh. "But how many people reject salvation. They would rather be miserable in their own way than happy in anybody else's way."
The Major answered never a word. For him all the glory of the day had faded. He walked slowly on by Jessie's side, meditating upon her words – wondering why she had so resolutely refused him. There had been not the least wavering – she had not even seemed to be taken by surprise – her mind had been made up long ago – not him, nor any other man, would she wed.
"Some early disappointment, perhaps," mused the Major – "a curate at Shepherd's Bush – those young men have a great deal to answer for."
They came to the hyacinth dell – an earthly paradise to the two happy lovers, who were sitting on a mossy bank, in a sheet of azure bloom, which, seen from the distance, athwart young trees, looked like blue, bright water.
To the Major the hazel copse and the bluebells – the young oak plantation – and all the lovely details of mosses and flowering grasses, and starry anemones – were odious. He felt in a hurry to get back to his club, and steep himself in London pleasures. All the benevolence seemed to have been crushed out of him.
Christabel saw that her old friend was out of spirits, and contrived to be by his side on their way back to the boat, trying to cheer him with sweetest words and loveliest smiles.
"Have we tired you?" she asked. "The afternoon is very warm."
"Tired me! You forget how I ramble over the hills at home. No; I am just a trifle put out – but it is nothing. I had news of a death this morning – a death that makes me richer by four hundred a year. If it were not for respect for my dead cousin who so kindly made me his heir, I think I should go to-night to the most rowdy theatre in London, just to put myself in spirits."
"Which are the rowdy theatres, Uncle Oliver?"
"Well, perhaps I ought not to use such a word. The theatres are all good in their way – but there are theatres and theatres. I should choose one of those to which the young men go night after night to see the same piece – a burlesque, or an opera bouffe – plenty of smart jokes and pretty girls."
"Why have you not taken me to those theatres?"
"We have not come to them yet. You have seen Shakespeare and modern comedy – which is rather a weak material as compared with Sheridan – or even with Colman and Morton, whose plays were our staple entertainment when I was a boy. You have heard all the opera singers?"
"Yes, you have been very good. But I want to see 'Cupid and Psyche' – two of my partners last night talked to me of 'Cupid and Psyche,' and were astounded that I had not seen it. I felt quite ashamed of my ignorance. I asked one of my partners, who was particularly enthusiastic, to tell me all about the play – and he did – to the best of his ability, which was not great – and he said that a Miss Mayne – Stella Mayne – who plays Psyche, is simply adorable. She is the loveliest woman in London, he says – and was greatly surprised that she had not been pointed out to me in the Park. Now really, Uncle Oliver, this is very remiss in you – you who are so clever in showing me famous people when we are driving in the Park."
"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. Once 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?