Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3. Braddon Mary Elizabeth
to a heritage of weakness and pain – bright young minds fettered by diseased bodies – born to perish untimely? Mr. Hamleigh, did ye ever read a book called 'Ecce Homo?'"
"Yes, it is a book of books. I know it by heart."
"Then ye'll may be remaimber the writer's summing up of practical Chreestianity as a seestem of ethics which in its ultimate perfection will result in the happiness of the human race – even that last enemy, Death, if not subdued, may be made to keep his distance, seemply by a due observance of natural laws – by an unselfish forethought and regard in each member of the human species for the welfare of the multitude. The man who becomes the father of a race of puny children, can be no friend to humanity. He predooms future suffering to the innocent by a reckless indulgence of his own inclination in the present."
"Yes, I believe you are right," said Angus, with a despairing sigh. "It seems a hard thing for a man who loves, and is beloved by, the sweetest among women, to forego even a few brief years of perfect bliss, and go down lonely to the grave – to accept this doctrine of renunciation, and count himself as one dead in life. Yet a year ago I told myself pretty much what you have told me to-day. I was tempted from my resolve by a woman's loving devotion – and now – a crucial point has come – and I must decide whether to marry or not."
"If you love humanity better than you love yourself, ye'll die a bachelor," said the Scotchman, gravely, but with infinite pity in his shrewd old face; "ye've asked me for the truth, and I've geeven it ye. Truth is often hard."
Angus gave his thin hot hand to the doctor in token of friendly feeling, and then silently turned his face to the wall, whereupon the doctor gently patted him upon the shoulder and left him.
Yes, it was hard. In the bright spring time, his health wondrously restored by that quiet restful winter on the shores of the Mediterranean, Angus had almost believed that he had given his enemy the slip – that Death's dominion over him was henceforth to be no more than over the common ruck of humanity, who, knowing not when or how the fatal lot may fall from the urn, drop into a habit of considering themselves immortal, and death a calamity of which one reads in the newspapers with only a kindly interest in other people's mortality. All through the gay London season he had been so utterly happy, so wonderfully well, that the insidious disease, which had declared itself in the past by so many unmistakable symptoms, seemed to have relaxed its grip upon him. He began to have faith in an advanced medical science – the power to cure maladies hitherto considered incurable. That long interval of languid empty days and nights of placid sleep – the heavy sweetness of southern air breathing over fields of orange flowers and violets, February roses and carnations, had brought strength and healing. The foe had been baffled by the new care which his victim had taken of an existence that had suddenly become precious.
This was the hope that had buoyed up Angus Hamleigh's spirits all through the happy springtime and summer which he had spent in the company of his betrothed. He had seen the physician who less than a year before had pronounced his sentence of doom, and the famous physician, taking the thing in the light-hearted way of a man for whom humanity is a collection of "cases," was jocose and congratulatory, full of wonder at his patient's restoration, and taking credit to himself for having recommended Hyères. And now the enemy had him by the throat. The foe, no longer insidiously hinting at his deadly meaning, held him in the fierce grip of pain and fever. Such an attack as this, following upon one summer day's imprudence, showed but too plainly by how frail a tie he clung to life – how brief and how prone to malady must be the remnant of his days.
Before the post went out he re-read Christabel's letter, smiling mournfully as he read.
"Poor child!" he murmured to himself, "God bless her for her innocence – God bless her for her unselfish desire to do right. If she only knew the truth – but, better that she should be spared the knowledge of evil. What good end would it serve if I were to enter upon painful explanations?"
He had himself propped up with pillows, and wrote, in a hand which he strove to keep from shaking, the following lines: —
"Dearest! I accept your decree: not for the reasons which you allege, which are no reasons; but for other motives which it would pain me too much to explain. I have loved you, I do love you, better than my own joy or comfort, better than my own life: and it is simply and wholly on that account I can resign myself to say, let us in the future be friends – and friends only.
He was so much better next day as to be able to sit up for an hour or two in the afternoon; and during that time he wrote at length to Mrs. Tregonell, telling her of his illness, and of his conversation with the Scotch doctor, and the decision at which he had arrived on the strength of that medical opinion, and leaving her at liberty to tell Christabel as much, or as little of this, as she thought fit.
"I know you will do what is best for my darling's happiness," he said. "If I did not believe this renunciation a sacred duty, and the only means of saving her from infinite pain in the future, nothing that she or even you could say about my past follies would induce me to renounce her. I would fight that question to the uttermost. But the other fatal fact is not to be faced, except by a blind and cowardly selfishness which I dare not practise."
After this day, the invalid mended slowly, and old Miss MacPherson, his aunt, being soon quite restored, Mr. Hamleigh telegraphed to his valet to bring books and other necessaries from his chambers in the Albany, and to meet him in the Isle of Arran, where he meant to vegetate for the next month or two, chartering a yacht of some kind, and living half on land and half on sea.
CHAPTER II
"ALAS FOR ME THEN, MY GOOD DAYS ARE DONE."
Angus Hamleigh's letter came upon Christabel like a torrent of cold water, as if that bright silvery arc which pierces the rock at St. Nectan's Kieve had struck upon her heart with its icy stream, and chilled it into stone. All through that long summer day upon which her letter must arrive at Hillside, she had lived in nervous expectation of a telegram expressing indignation, remonstrance, pleading, anger – a savage denial of her right to renounce her lover – to break her engagement. She had made up her mind in all good faith. She meant to go on to the bitter end, in the teeth of her lover's opposition, to complete her renunciation in favour of that frail creature who had so solemn a claim upon Angus Hamleigh's honour. She meant to fight this good fight – but she expected that the struggle would be hard. Oh, how long and dismal those summer hours seemed, which she spent in her own room, trying to read, trying to comfort herself with saddest strains of classic melody, and always and through all listening for the telegraph boy's knock at the hall door, or for the sudden stopping of a hansom against the kerb, bringing home her lover to remonstrate in person, in defiance of all calculations of time and space.
There was no telegram. She had to wait nearly twenty-four hours for the slow transit of the mails from the high latitude of Inverness. And when she read Angus Hamleigh's letter – those few placid words which so quietly left her free to take her own way – her heart sank with a dull despair that was infinitely worse than the keen agonies of the last few days. The finality of that brief letter – the willingness to surrender her – the cold indifference, as it seemed, to her future fate – was the hardest blow of all. Too surely it confirmed all those humiliating doubts which had tortured her since her discovery of that wretched past. He had never really cared for her. It was she who had forced him into an avowal of affection by her unconscious revelation of love – she who, unmaidenly in her ignorance of life and mankind, had been the wooer rather than the wooed.
"Thank God that my pride and my duty helped me to decide," she said to herself: "what should I have done if I had married him and found out afterwards how weak a hold I had upon his heart – if he had told me one day that he had married me out of pity."
Christabel told Mrs. Tregonell she had written to Mr. Hamleigh – she spoke of him only as Mr. Hamleigh now – and had received his reply, and that all was now over between them.
"I want you to return his presents for me, Auntie," she said. "They are too valuable to be sent to his chambers while he is away – the diamond necklace which he gave me on my birthday – just like that one I saw on the stage – I suppose he thinks all women have exactly the same