Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

Candles were lighted, and Mrs. Tregonell and her guests dispersed, the party from the billiard-room meeting them in the hall.

These lighter-minded people, the drama of whose existence was just now in the comedy stage, went noisily up to their rooms; but the Baron, who was usually among the most loquacious, retired almost in silence. Nor did Christabel do more than bid her guests a brief good-night. Neither Leonard nor his friend Jack Vandeleur had shown themselves since dinner. Whether they were still in the Squire's den, or whether they had retired to their own rooms no one knew.

The Baron's servant was waiting to attend his master. He was a man who had been with de Cazalet in California, Mexico, and South America – who had lived with him in his bachelorhood and in his married life – knew all the details of his domestic career, had been faithful to him in wealth and in poverty, knew all that there was to be known about him – the best and the worst – and had made up his mind to hold by an employment which had been adventurous, profitable, and tolerably easy, not entirely free from danger, or from the prospect of adversity – yet always hopeful. So thorough a scamp as the Baron must always find some chance open to him – thus, at least, argued Henri le Mescam, his unscrupulous ally. The man was quick, clever – able to turn his hand to anything – valet, groom, cook, courier – as necessity demanded.

"Is Salathiel pretty fresh?" asked the Baron.

"Fit as a fiddle: he hasn't been out since you hunted him four days ago."

"That's lucky. He will be able to go the pace to-morrow morning. Have him harnessed to that American buggy of Mr. Tregonell's at six o'clock."

"I suppose you know that it's hardly light at six."

"There will be quite enough light for me. Pack my smallest portmanteau with linen for a week, and a second suit – no dress-clothes – and have the trap ready in the stable-yard when the clock strikes six. I have to catch a train at Launceston at 7.45. You will follow in the afternoon with the luggage."

"To your London rooms, Sir?"

"Yes. If you don't find me there you will wait for further instructions. You may have to join me on the other side of the channel."

"I hope so, Sir."

"Sick of England already?"

"Never cared much for it, Sir. I began to think I should die of the dulness of this place."

"Rather more luxurious than our old quarters at St. Heliers ten years ago, when you were marker at Jewson's, while I was teaching drawing and French at the fashionable academies of the island."

"That was bad, Sir; but luxury isn't everything in life. A man's mind goes to rust in a place of this kind."

"Well, there will not be much rust for you in future, I believe. How would you like it if I were to take you back to the shores of the Pacific?"

"That's just what I should like, Sir. You were a king there, and I was your prime minister."

"And I may be a king again – perhaps this time with a queen – a proud and beautiful queen."

Le Mescam smiled, and shrugged his shoulders.

"The queenly element was not quite wanting in the past, Sir," he said.

"Pshaw, Henri, the ephemeral fancy of the hour. Such chance entanglements as those do not rule a man's life."

"Perhaps not, Sir; but I know one of those chance entanglements made Lima unpleasantly warm for us; and if, after you winged Don Silvio, there hadn't been a pair of good horses waiting for us, you might never have seen the outside of Peru."

"And if a duel was dangerous in Lima, it would be ten times more dangerous in Cornwall, would it not, Henri?"

"Of course it would, Sir. But you are not thinking of anything like a duel here – you can't be so mad as to think of it."

"Certainly not. And now you can pack that small portmanteau, while I take a stretch. I sha'n't take off my clothes: a man who has to be up before six should never trifle with his feelings by making believe to go to bed."

CHAPTER XII
"SHE STOOD UP IN BITTER CASE, WITH A PALE YET STEADY FACE."

The silence of night and slumber came down upon the world, shadow and darkness were folded round and about it. The ticking of the old eight-day clock in the hall, of the bracket clock in the corridor, and of half a dozen other time-pieces, conscientiously performing in empty rooms, took that solemn and sepulchral sound which all clocks, down to the humblest Dutchman, assume after midnight. Sleep, peace, and silence seemed to brood over all human and brute life at Mount Royal. Yet there were some who had no thought of sleep that night.

In Mr. Tregonell's dressing-room there was the light of lamp and fire, deep into the small hours. The master of the house lolled, half-dressed, in an armchair by the hearth; while his friend, Captain Vandeleur, in smoking-jacket and slippers, lounged with his back to the chimney-piece, and a cigarette between his lips. A whisky bottle and a couple of siphons stood on a tray on the Squire's writing-table, an open pistol-case near at hand.

"You'd better lie down for a few hours," said Captain Vandeleur. "I'll call you at half-past five."

"I'd rather sit here. I may get a nap by-and-by perhaps. You can go to bed if you are tired: I sha'n't oversleep myself."

"I wish you'd give up this business, Tregonell," said his friend, with unaccustomed seriousness. "This man is a dead shot. We heard of him in Bolivia, don't you remember? A man who has spent half his life in shooting-galleries, and who has lived where life counts for very little. Why should you stake your life against his? It isn't even betting: you're good enough at big game, but you've had very little pistol practice. Even if you were to kill him, which isn't on the cards, you'd be tried for murder; and where's the advantage of that?"

"I'll risk it," answered Leonard, doggedly, "I saw him with my wife's hand clasped in his – saw him with his lips close to her face – close enough for kisses – heard her promise him an answer – to-morrow. By Heaven there shall be no such to-morrow for him and for me. For one of us there shall be an end of all things."

"I don't believe Mrs. Tregonell is capable" – began Jack, thoughtfully mumbling his cigarette.

"You've said that once before, and you needn't say it again. Capable! Why, man alive, I saw them together. Nothing less than the evidence of my own eyes would have convinced me. I have been slow enough to believe. There is not a man or woman in this house, yourself included, who has not, in his secret soul, despised me for my slowness. And yet, now, because there is a question of a pistol-shot or two you fence round, and try to persuade me that my wife's good name is immaculate, that all which you have seen and wondered at for the last three weeks means nothing."

"Those open flirtations seldom do mean anything," said Jack, persuasively.

A man may belong to the hawk tribe and yet not be without certain latent instincts of compassion and good feeling.

"Perhaps not – but secret meetings do: what I saw at the Kieve to-day was conclusive. Besides, the affair is all settled – you and de Cazalet have arranged it between you. He is willing that there should be no witness but you. The whole business will rest a secret between us three; and if we get quietly down to the sands before any one is astir to see us no one else need ever know what happened there."

"If there is bloodshed the thing must be known."

"It will seem like accident?"

"True," answered Vandeleur, looking at him searchingly; "like that accident last year at the Kieve – poor Hamleigh's death. Isn't to-morrow the anniversary, by-the-by?"

"Yes – the date has come round again."

"Dates have an awkward knack of doing that. There is a cursed mechanical regularity in life which makes a man wish himself in some savage island where there is no such thing as an almanack," said Vandeleur, taking out another cigarette. "If I had been Crusoe, I should never have stuck up that post. I should have been too glad to get rid of quarter-day."

In Christabel's room at the other end of the long corridor there was only the dim light of the night-lamp, nor was there any sound, save the ticking of the clock and the crackling of the cinders in the dying fire. Yet here there was no more sleep nor peace than in the chamber of the man who was to wager his life against the life of his fellow-man in the pure light of the dawning day. Christabel stood at her window, dressed just as she had left the drawing-room, looking out at the sky and the sea, and thinking of him who, at this hour last year, was still a part of her life – perchance a watcher then as she was watching now, gazing with vaguely questioning eyes into the illimitable panorama of the heavens, worlds beyond worlds, suns and planetary systems, scattered like grains of sand over the awful desert of infinite space, innumerable, immeasurable, the infinitesimals of the astronomer, the despair of faith. Yes, a year ago and he was beneath that roof, her friend, her counsellor, if need were; for she had never trusted him so completely, never so understood and realized all the nobler qualities of his nature, as in those last days, after she had set an eternal barrier between herself and him.

She stood at the open lattice, the cold night air blowing upon her fever-heated face; her whole being absorbed not in deliberate thought, but in a kind of waking trance. Strange pictures came out of the darkness, and spread themselves before her eyes. She saw her first lover lying on the broad flat rock at St. Nectan's Kieve, face downward, shot through the heart, the water stained with the life-blood slowly oozing from his breast. And then, when that picture faded into the blackness of night, she saw her husband and Oliver de Cazalet standing opposite to each other on the broad level sands at Trebarwith, the long waves rising up behind them like a low wall of translucent green, crested with silvery whiteness. So they would stand face to face a few hours hence. From her lurking-place behind the trees and brushwood at the entrance to the Kieve she had heard the appointment made – and she knew that at seven o'clock those two were to meet, with deadliest intent. She had so planned it – a life for a life.

She had no shadow of doubt as to which of those two would fall. Three months ago on the Riffel she had seen the Baron's skill as a marksman tested – she had seen him the wonder of the crowd at those rustic sports – seen him perform feats which only a man who has reduced pistol-shooting to a science would attempt. Against this man Leonard Tregonell – good all-round sportsman as he was – could have very little chance. Leonard had always been satisfied with that moderate skilfulness which comes easily and unconsciously. He had never given time and labour to any of the arts he pursued – content to be able to hold his own among parasites and flatterers.

"A life for a life," repeated Christabel, her lips moving dumbly, her heart throbbing heavily, as if it were beating out those awful words. "A life for a life – the old law – the law of justice – God's own sentence against murder. The law could not touch this murderer – but there was one way by which that cruel deed might be punished, and I found it."

The slow silent hours wore on. Christabel left the window, shivering with cold, though cheeks, brow, and lips were burning. She walked up and down the room for a long while, till the very atmosphere of the room, nay, of the house itself, seemed unendurable. She felt as if she were being suffocated, and this sense of oppression became so strong that she was sorely tempted to shriek aloud, to call upon some one for rescue from that stifling vault. The feeling grew to such intensity that she flung on her hat and cloak, and went quickly downstairs to a lobby-door that opened into the garden, a little door which she had unbolted many a night after the servants had locked up the house, in order to steal out in the moonlight and among the dewy flowers, and across the dewy turf to those shrubbery walks which had such a mysterious look – half in light and half in shadow.

She closed the door behind her, and stood with the night wind blowing round her, looking up at the sky; clouds were drifting across the starry dome, and the moon, like a storm-beaten boat, seemed to be hurrying through them. The cold wind revived her, and she began to breathe more freely.

"I think I was going mad just now," she said to herself.

And then she thought she would go out upon the hills, and down to the churchyard in the valley. On this night, of all nights, she would visit Angus Hamleigh's grave. It was long since she had seen the spot where he lay – since her return from Switzerland she had not once entered a church. Jessie had remonstrated with her gravely and urgently – but without eliciting any explanation of this falling off in one who had been hitherto so steadfastly devout.

"I don't feel inclined to go to church, Jessie," she said, coolly; "there is no use in discussing my feelings. I don't feel fit for church; and I am not going in order to gratify your idea of what is conventional and correct."

"I am not thinking of this in its conventional aspect – I have always made light of conventionalities – but things must be in a bad way with you, Christabel, when you do not feel fit for church."

"Things are in a bad way with me," answered Christabel, with a dogged moodiness which was insurmountable. "I never said they were good."

This surrender of old pious habits had given Jessie more uneasiness than any other fact in Christabel's life. Her flirtation with the Baron must needs be meaningless frivolity, Jessie had thought; since it seemed hardly within the limits of possibility that a refined and pure-minded woman could have any real penchant for that showy adventurer; but this persistent avoidance of church meant mischief.

And now, in the deep dead-of-night silence, Christabel went on her lonely pilgrimage to her first lover's grave. Oh, happy summer day when, sitting by her side outside the Maidenhead coach, all her own through life, as it seemed, he told her how, if she had the ordering of his grave, she was to bury him in that romantic churchyard, hidden in a cleft of the hill. She had not forgotten this even amidst the horror of his fate, and had told the vicar that Mr. Hamleigh's grave must be at Minster and no otherwhere. Then had come his relations, suggesting burial-places with family associations – vaults, mausoleums, the pomp and circumstance of sepulture. But Christabel had been firm; and while the others hesitated a paper was found in the dead man's desk requesting that he might be buried at Minster.

How lonely the world seemed in this solemn pause between night and morning. Never before had Christabel been out alone at such an hour. She had travelled in the dead of the night, and had seen the vague dim night-world from the window of a railway carriage – but never until now had she walked across these solitary hills after midnight. It seemed as if for the first time in her life she were alone with the stars.

How difficult it was in her present state of mind to realize that those lights, tremulous in the deep blue vault, were worlds, and combinations of worlds – almost all of them immeasurably greater than this earth on which she trod. To her they seemed living watchers of the night – solemn, mysterious beings, looking down at her with all-understanding eyes. She had an awful feeling of their companionship as she looked up at them – a mystic sense that all her thoughts – the worst and best of them – were being read by that galaxy of eyes.

Strangely beautiful did the hills and the sky – the indefinite shapes of the trees against the edge of the horizon, the mysterious expanse of the dark sea – seem to her in the night silence. She had no fear of any human presence, but there was an awful feeling in being, as it were, for the first time in her life alone with the immensities. Those hills and gorges, so familiar in all phases of daylight, from sunrise to after set of sun, assumed Titanic proportions in this depth of night, and were as strange to her as if she had never trodden this path before. What was the wind saying, as it came moaning and sobbing along the deep gorge through which the river ran? – what did the wind say as she crossed the narrow bridge which trembled under her light footfall? Surely there was some human meaning in that long minor wail, which burst suddenly into a wild unearthly shriek, and then died away in a low sobbing tone, as of sorrow and pain that grew dumb from sheer exhaustion, and not because there was any remission of pain or sorrow.

With that unearthly sound still following her, she went up the winding hill-side path, and then slowly descended to the darkness of the churchyard – so sunk and sheltered that it seemed like going down into a vault.

Just then the moon leapt from behind an inky cloud, and, in that ghostly light, Christabel saw the pale grey granite cross which had been erected in memory of Angus Hamleigh. It stood up in the midst of nameless mounds, and humble slate tablets, pale and glittering – an unmistakable sign of the spot where her first lover lay. Once only before to-night had she seen that monument. Absorbed in the pursuit of a Pagan scheme of vengeance she had not dared to come within the precincts of the church, where she had knelt and prayed through all the sinless years of her girlhood. To-night some wild impulse had brought her here – to-night, when that crime which she called retribution was on the point of achievement.

She went with stumbling footsteps through the long grass, across the low mounds, till she came to that beneath which Angus Hamleigh lay. She fell like a lifeless thing at the foot of the cross. Some loving hand had covered the mound of earth with primroses and violets, and there were low clambering roses all round the grave. The scent of sweetbriar was mixed with the smell of earth and grass. Some one had cared for that grave, although she, who so loved the dead, had never tended it.

"Oh, my love! my love!" she sobbed, with her face upon the grass and the primrose leaves, and her arms clasping the granite; "my murdered love – my first, last, only lover – before to-morrow's sun is down your death will be revenged, and my life will be over! I have lived only for that – only for that, Angus, my love, my love!" She kissed the cold wet grass more passionately than she had ever kissed the dead face mouldering underneath it. Only to the dead – to the utterly lost and gone – is given this supreme passion – love sublimated to despair. From the living there is always something kept back – something saved and garnered for an after-gift – some reserve in the mind or the heart of the giver; but to the dead love gives all – with a wild self-abandonment which knows not restraint or measure. The wife who, while this man yet lived, had been so rigorously true to honour and duty, now poured into the deaf dead ears a reckless avowal of love – love that had never faltered, never changed – love that had renounced the lover, and had yet gone on loving to the end.

The wind came moaning out of the valley again with that sharp human cry, as of lamentation for the dead.

"Angus!" murmured Christabel, piteously, "Angus, can you hear me? – do you know? Oh, my God! is there memory or understanding in the world where he has gone, or is it all a dead blank? Help me, my God! I have lost all the old sweet illusions of faith – I have left off praying, hoping, believing – I have only thought of my dead – thought of death and of him till all the living world grew unreal to me – and God and Heaven were only like old half-forgotten dreams. Angus!"

For a long time she lay motionless, her cold hands clasping the cold stone, her lips pressed upon the soft dewy turf, her face buried in primrose leaves – then slowly, and with an effort, she raised herself upon her knees, and knelt with her arms encircling the cross – that sacred emblem which had once meant so much for her: but which, since that long blank interval last winter, seemed to have lost all meaning. One great overwhelming grief had made her a Pagan – thirsting for revenge – vindictive – crafty – stealthy as an American Indian on the trail of his deadly foe – subtle as Greek or Oriental to plan and to achieve a horrible retribution.

She looked at the inscription on the cross, legible in the moonlight, deeply cut in large Gothic letters upon the grey stone, filled in with dark crimson.

"Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord."

Who had put that inscription upon the cross? It was not there when the monument was first put up. Christabel remembered going with Jessie to see the grave in that dim half-blank time before she went to Switzerland. Then there was nothing but a name and a date. And now, in awful distinctness, there appeared those terrible words – God's own promise of retribution – the claim of the Almighty to be the sole avenger of human wrongs.

And she, reared by a religious woman, brought up in the love and fear of God, had ignored that sublime and awful attribute of the Supreme. She had not been content to leave her lover's death to the Great Avenger. She had brooded on his dark fate, until out of the gloom of despair there had arisen the image of a crafty and bloody retribution. "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." So runs the dreadful sentence of an older law. The newer, lovelier law, which began in the after-glow of Philosophy, the dawn of Christianity, bids man leave revenge to God. And she, who had once called herself a Christian, had planned and plotted, making herself the secret avenger of a criminal who had escaped the grip of the law.

"Must he lie in his grave, unavenged, until the Day of Judgment?" she asked herself. "God's vengeance is slow."

An hour later, and Christabel, pale and exhausted, her garments heavy with dew, was kneeling by her boy's bed in the faint light of the night-lamp; kneeling by him as she had knelt a year ago, but never since her return from Switzerland – praying as she had not prayed since Angus Hamleigh's death. After those long, passionate prayers, she rose and looked at the slumberer's face – her husband's face in little – but oh! how pure and fresh and radiant. God keep him from boyhood's sins of self-love and self-indulgence – from manhood's evil passions, hatred and jealousy. All her life to come seemed too little to be devoted to watching and guarding this beloved from the encircling snares and dangers of life. Pure and innocent now, in this fair dawn of infancy, he nestled in her arms – he clung to her and believed in her. What business had she with any other fears, desires, or hopes – God having given her the sacred duties of maternity – the master-passion of motherly love?

"I have been mad!" she said to herself; "I have been living in a ghastly dream: but God has awakened me – God's word has cured me."

God's word had come to her at the crisis of her life. A month ago, while her scheme of vengeance seemed still far from fulfilment, that awful sentence would hardly have struck so deeply. It was on the very verge of the abyss that those familiar words caught her; just when the natural faltering of her womanhood, upon the eve of a terrible crime, made her most sensitive to a sublime impression.

The first faint streak of day glimmered in the east, a pale cold light, livid and ghostly upon the edge of the sea yonder, white and wan upon the eastward points of rock and headland, when Jessie Bridgeman was startled from her light slumbers by a voice at her bedside. She was always an early riser, and it cost her no effect to sit up in bed, with her eyes wide open, and all her senses on the alert.

"Christabel, what is the matter? Is Leo ill?"

"No, Leo is well enough. Get up and dress yourself quickly, Jessie. I want you to come with me – on a strange errand; but it is something that must be done, and at once."

"Christabel, you are mad."

"No. I have been mad. I think you must know it – this is the awakening. Come, Jessie."

Jessie had sprung out of bed, and put on slippers and dressing-gown, without taking her eyes off Christabel. Presently she felt her cloak and gown.

"Why, you are wet through. Where have you been?"

"To Angus Hamleigh's grave. Who put that inscription on the cross?"

"I did. Nobody seemed to care about his grave – no one attended to it. I got to think the grave my own property, and that I might do as I liked with it."

"But those awful words! What made you put them there?"

"I wanted the man who killed him to be reminded that there is an Avenger."

"Wash your face and put on your clothes as fast as you can. Every moment is of consequence," said Christabel.

She would explain nothing. Jessie urged her to take off her wet cloak, to go and change her gown and shoes; but she refused with angry impatience.

"There will be time enough for that afterwards," she said; "what I have to do will not take long, but it must be done at once. Pray be quick."

Jessie struggled through her hurried toilet, and followed Christabel along the corridor, without question or exclamation. They went to the door of Baron de Cazalet's room. A light shone under the bottom of the door, and there was the sound of some one stirring within. Christabel knocked, and the door was opened almost instantly by the Baron himself.

"Is it the trap?" he asked. "It's an hour too soon."

"No, it is I, Monsieur de Cazalet. May I come in for a few minutes? I have something to tell you."

"Christabel – my – " He stopped in the midst of that eager exclamation, at sight of the other figure in the background.

He was dressed for the day – carefully dressed, like a man who in a crisis of his life wishes to appear at no disadvantage. His pistol-case stood ready on the table. A pair of candles, burnt low in the sockets of the old silver candlesticks, and a heap of charred and torn paper in the fender showed that the Baron had been getting rid of superfluous documents. Christabel went into the room, followed by Jessie, the Baron staring at them both, in blank amazement. He drew an armchair near the expiring fire, and Christabel sank into it, exhausted and half fainting.

"What does it all mean?" asked de Cazalet, looking at Jessie, "and why are you here with her?"

"Why is she here?" asked Jessie. "There can be no reason except – "

She touched her forehead lightly with the tips of her fingers.

Christabel saw the action.

"No, I am not mad, now," she said, "I believe I have been mad, but that is all over. Monsieur de Cazalet, you and my husband are to fight a duel this morning, on Trebarwith sands."

"My dear Mrs. Tregonell, what a strange notion!"

"Don't take the trouble to deny anything. I overheard your conversation yesterday afternoon. I know everything."

"Would it not have been better to keep the knowledge to yourself, and to remember your promise to me, last night?"

"Yes, I remember that promise. I said I would meet you at Bodmin Road, after you had shot my husband."

"There was not a word about shooting your husband."

"No; but the fact was in our minds, all the same – in yours as well as in mine. Only there was one difference between us. You thought that when you had killed Leonard I would run away with you. That was to be your recompense for murder. I meant that you should kill him, but that you should never see my face again. You would have served my purpose – you would have been the instrument of my revenge!"

"Christabel!"

"Do not call me by that name – I am nothing to you – I never could, under any possible phase of circumstances, be any nearer to you than I am at this moment. From first to last I have been acting a part. When I saw you at that shooting match, on the Riffel, I said to myself 'Here is a man, who in any encounter with my husband, must be fatal.' My husband killed the only man I ever loved, in a duel, without witnesses – a duel forced upon him by insane and causeless jealousy. Whether that meeting was fair or unfair in its actual details, I cannot tell; but at the best it was more like a murder than a duel. When, through Miss Bridgeman's acuteness, I came to understand what that meeting had been, I made up my mind to avenge Mr. Hamleigh's death. For a long time my brain was under a cloud – I could think of nothing, plan nothing. Then came clearer thoughts, and then I met you; and the scheme of my revenge flashed upon me like a suggestion direct from Satan. I knew my husband's jealous temper, and how easy it would be to fire a train there, and I made my plans with that view. You lent yourself very easily to my scheme."

"Lent myself!" cried the Baron, indignantly; and then with a savage oath he said: "I loved you, Mrs. Tregonell, and you made me believe that you loved me."

"I let you make fine speeches, and I pretended to be pleased at them," answered Christabel, with supreme scorn. "I think that was all."

"No, madam, it was not all. You fooled me to the top of my bent. What, those lovely looks, those lowered accents – all meant nothing? It was all a delusion – an acted lie? You never cared for me?"

"No," answered Christabel. "My heart was buried with the dead. I never loved but one man, and he was murdered, as I believed – and I made up my mind to avenge his murder. 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' That sentence was in my mind always, when I thought of Leonard Tregonell. I meant you to be the executioner. And now – now – God knows how the light has come – but the God I worshipped when I was a happy sinless girl, has called me out of the deep pit of sin – called me to remorse and atonement. You must not fight this duel. You must save me from this horrible crime that I planned – save me and yourself from blood-guiltiness. You must not meet Leonard at Trebarwith."

"And stamp myself as a cur, to oblige you: after having lent myself so simply to your scheme of vengeance, lend myself as complacently to your repentance. No, Mrs. Tregonell, that is too much to ask. I will be your bravo, if you like, since I took the part unconsciously – but I will not brand myself with the charge of cowardice – even for you."