replied Mrs. Tregonell, with a dignified air. Christabel's only remembrance of her uncle was of a large loud man, who blustered and scolded a good deal, and frequently contrived, perhaps, without meaning it, to make everybody in the house uncomfortable; so she reflected inwardly upon that blessed dispensation which, however poorly wives may think of living husbands, provides that every widow should consider her departed spouse completely admirable.
"And was he a nice boy in those days?" asked Christabel, keenly interested.
"He was a handsome gentlemanlike lad – very intellectual looking; but I was grieved to see that he looked delicate, like his father; and his dame told me that he generally had a winter cough."
"Who took care of him in those days?"
"His maternal aunt – a baronet's wife, with a handsome house in Eaton Square. All his mother's people were well placed in life."
"Poor boy! hard to have neither father nor mother. It was twelve years ago when you spent that season in London with the Squire," said Christabel, calculating profoundly with the aid of her finger tips; "and Angus Hamleigh was then sixteen, which makes him now eight-and-twenty – dreadfully old. And since then he has been at Oxford – and he got the Newdigate – what is the Newdigate? – and he did not hunt, or drive tandem, or have rats in his rooms, or paint the doors vermilion – like – like the general run of young men," said Christabel, reddening, and hurrying on confusedly; "and he was altogether rather a superior person at the university."
"He had not your cousin Leonard's high spirits and powerful physique," said Mrs. Tregonell, as if she were ever so slightly offended. "Young men's tastes are so different."
"Yes," sighed Christabel, "it's lucky they are, is it not? It wouldn't do for them all to keep rats in their rooms, would it? The poor old colleges would smell so dreadful. Well," with another sigh, "it is just three weeks since Angus Hamleigh accepted your invitation to come here to stay, and I have been expiring of curiosity ever since. If he keeps me expiring much longer I shall be dead before he comes. And I have a dreadful foreboding that, when he does appear, I shall detest him."
"No fear of that," said Miss Bridgeman, the owner of the voice that issued now and again from the covert of a deep armchair on the other side of the fireplace.
"Why not, Mistress Oracle?" asked Christabel.
"Because, as Mr. Hamleigh is accomplished and good-looking, and as you see very few young men of any kind, and none that are particularly attractive, the odds are fifty to one that you will fall in love with him."
"I am not that kind of person," protested Christabel, drawing up her long full throat, a perfect throat, and one of the girl's chief beauties.
"I hope not," said Mrs. Tregonell; "I trust that Belle has better sense than to fall in love with a young man, just because he happens to come to stay in the house."
Christabel was on the point of exclaiming, "Why, Auntie, you did it;" but caught herself up sharply, and cried out instead, with an air of settling the question for ever.
"My dear Jessie, he is eight-and-twenty. Just ten years older than I am."
"Of course – he's ever so much too old for her. A blasé man of the world," said Mrs. Tregonell. "I should be deeply sorry to see my darling marry a man of that age – and with such antecedents. I should like her to marry a young man not above two or three years her senior."
"And fond of rats," said Jessie Bridgeman to herself, for she had a shrewd idea that she knew the young man whose image filled Mrs. Tregonell's mind as she spoke.
All these words were spoken in a goodly oak-panelled room in the Manor House known as Mount Royal, on the slope of a bosky hill about a mile and a half from the little town of Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall. It was an easy matter, according to the Heralds' Office, to show that Mount Royal had belonged to the Tregonells in the days of the Norman kings; for the Tregonells traced their descent, by a female branch, from the ancient baronial family of Botterell or Bottreaux, who once held a kind of Court in their castle on Mount Royal, had their dungeons and their prisoners, and, in the words of Carew, "exercised some large jurisdiction." Of the ancient castle hardly a stone remained; but the house in which Mrs. Tregonell lived was as old as the reign of James the First, and had all the rich and quaint beauty of that delightful period in architecture. Nor was there any prettier room at Mount Royal than this spacious oak-panelled parlour, with curious nooks and cupboards, a recessed fireplace, or "cosy-corner," with a small window on each side of the chimney-breast, and one particular alcove placed at an angle of the house, overlooking one of the most glorious views in England. It might be hyperbole perhaps to call those Cornish hills mountains, yet assuredly it was a mountain landscape over which the eye roved as it looked from the windows of Mount Royal; for those wide sweeps of hill side, those deep clefts and gorges, and heathery slopes, on which the dark red cattle grazed in silent peacefulness, and the rocky bed of the narrow river that went rushing through the deep valley, had all the grandeur of the Scottish Highlands, all the pastoral beauty of Switzerland. And away to the right, beyond the wild and indented coast-line, that horned coast which is said to have given its name to Cornwall – Cornu-Wales – stretched the Atlantic.
The room had that quaint charm peculiar to rooms occupied by many generations, and upon which each age as it went by has left its mark. It was a room full of anachronisms. There was some of the good old Jacobean furniture left in it, while spindle-legged Chippendale tables and luxurious nineteenth-century chairs and sofas agreeably contrasted with those heavy oak cabinets and corner cupboards. Here an old Indian screen or a china monster suggested a fashionable auction room, filled with ladies who wore patches and played ombre, and squabbled for ideal ugliness in Oriental pottery; there a delicately carved cherry-wood prie-dieu, with claw feet, recalled the earlier beauties of the Stuart Court. Time had faded the stamped velvet curtains to that neutral withered-leaf hue which painters love in a background, and against which bright yellow chrysanthemums and white asters in dark red and blue Japanese bowls, seen dimly in the fitful fire-glow, made patches of light and colour.
The girl kneeling by the matron's chair, looking dreamily into the fire, was even fairer than her surroundings. She was thoroughly English in her beauty, features not altogether perfect, but complexion of that dazzling fairness and wild-rose bloom which is in itself enough for loveliness; a complexion so delicate as to betray every feeling of the sensitive mind, and to vary with every shade of emotion. Her eyes were blue, clear as summer skies, and with an expression of childlike innocence – that look which tells of a soul whose purity has never been tarnished by the knowledge of evil. That frank clear outlook was natural in a girl brought up as Christabel Courtenay had been at a good woman's knee, shut in and sheltered from the rough world, reared in the love and fear of God, shaping every thought of her life by the teaching of the Gospel.
She had been an orphan at nine years old, and had parted for ever from mother and father before her fifth birthday, Mrs. Courtenay leaving her only child in her sister's care, and going out to India to join her husband, one of the Sudder Judges. Husband and wife died of cholera in the fourth year of Mrs. Courtenay's residence at Calcutta, leaving Christabel in her aunt's care.
Mr. Courtenay was a man of ample means, and his wife, daughter and co-heiress with Mrs. Tregonell of Ralph Champernowne, had a handsome dowry, so Christabel might fairly rank as an heiress. On her grandfather's death she inherited half of the Champernowne estate, which was not entailed. But she had hardly ever given a thought to her financial position. She knew that she was a ward in Chancery, and that Mrs. Tregonell was her guardian and adopted mother, that she had always as much money as she wanted, and never experienced the pain of seeing poverty which she could not relieve in some measure from her well-supplied purse. The general opinion in the neighbourhood of Mount Royal was that the Indian Judge had accumulated an immense fortune during his twenty years' labour as a civil servant; but this
