Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

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.