It was here that he found his passion for books, having discovered an English language library tucked away in a small rural village. Having worked in film in which he still dabbles , with several features and shorts in production, Paul ventured into fiction. In Paul established Twin Monocle Publishing to release new and exciting genre stories from talented writers. Are you an author? Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central.
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I hope you feel sorry for Tristan? I assure you, in the old romance which you have not read—which you would hardly care to read—neither Tristan nor Iseult are spotless. Their fate was so sad, and they loved each other so truly. You can believe, as the Greeks believed, in atonement and purification. That is a beautiful creed. Christabel—may I call you Christabel? You shall be Miss Courtenay directly we leave this spot. If—if—I could call you by that name always, or by a name still nearer and dearer. But you must judge. Give me half-an-hour—half-an-hour of heartfelt earnest truth on my side, and pitying patience on yours.
Christabel, my past life has not been what a stainless Christian would call a good life. I have not been so bad as Tristan. I have violated no sacred charge—betrayed no kinsman. I suppose I have been hardly worse than the common run of young men, who have the means of leading an utterly useless life. I have lived selfishly, unthinkingly—caring for my own pleasure—with little thought of anything that was to come afterwards, either on earth or in heaven.
But all that is past and done with. My wild oats are sown; I have had enough of youth and folly. When I came to Cornwall the other day I thought that I was on the threshold of middle age, and that middle age could give me nothing but a few years of pain and weariness. You have done all this, Christabel. I love you as I never thought it possible to love! You remember with what pathetic tenderness Thetis speaks of her son,.
The Fates have spoken about me quite as plainly as ever the sea-nymph foretold the doom of her son. He was given the choice of length of days or glory, and he deemed fame better than long life. But my life has been as inglorious as it must be brief. Three months ago, one of the wisest of physicians pronounced my doom. The hereditary malady which for the last fifty years has been the curse of my family shows itself by the clearest indications in my case. I could have told the doctor this just as well as he told me; but it is best to have official information.
I may die before I am a year older; I may crawl on for the next ten years—a fragile hot-house plant, sent to winter under southern skies. She made no pretence of hiding her pity or her love. God is so good. What prayer will He not grant us if we only believe in Him? Faith will remove mountains. No, Christabel, there is no chance of long life for me. If hope—if love could give length of days, my new hopes, born of you—my new love felt for you, might work that miracle.
But I am the child of my century: I only believe in the possible. And knowing that my years are so few, and that during that poor remnant of life I may be a chronic invalid, how can I—how dare I be so selfish as to ask any girl—young, fresh, and bright, with all the joys of life untasted—to be the companion of my decline? The better she loved me, the sadder would be her life—the keener would be the anguish of watching my decay!
Consider what you would take upon yourself—you who perhaps have never known what sickness means—have never seen the horrors of mortal disease. I have thought more of that than of the actual misery of the scene. Think of that, Christabel! Poets and novelists have described it as a kind of euthanasia; but the poetical mind is rarely strong in scientific knowledge. I want you to understand all the horror of a life spent with a chronic sufferer, about whom the cleverest physician in London has made up his mind. It would be a life spent in Paradise.
Pain and sickness could hardly touch me with their sting. I want only to be sure of that. If the doom were more dreadful than it is—if there were but a few short months of life left for you, I would ask you to let me share them; I would ask to nurse you and watch you in sickness. There would be no other fate on earth so full of sweetness for me.
Yes, even with death and everlasting mourning waiting for me at the end. I begin to believe in miracles. I almost feel as if you could give me length of years, as well as bliss beyond all thought or hope of mine. Christabel, Christabel, God forgive me if I am asking you to wed sorrow; but you have made this hour of my life an unspeakable ecstasy.
Yet I will not take you quite at your word, love. You shall have time to consider what you are going to do—time to talk to your aunt. I will be guided by no one. I think God meant me to love you—and cure you. God bless you, my beloved! You belong to those whom He does everlastingly bless, who are so angelic upon this earth that they teach us to believe in heaven. My Christabel, my own! I promised to call you Miss Courtenay when we left Pentargon, but I suppose now you are to be Christabel for the rest of my life!
His delicate features were radiant with happiness. Who could at such a moment remember death and doom? All painful words which need be said had been spoken. Tregonell and her niece were alone together in the library half-an-hour before afternoon tea, when the autumn light was just beginning to fade, and the autumn mist to rise ghostlike from the narrow little harbour of Boscastle. Miss Bridgeman had contrived that it should be so, just as she had contrived the visit to the seals that morning. It was the dream of my life that you two should marry. We had been too much like brother and sister.
He was too confident—too secure of his power to win you. And I, his mother, have brought a rival here—a rival who has stolen your love from my son. Leonard must always be first in my mind. I like Angus Hamleigh. He is all that his father was—yes—it is almost a painful likeness—painful to me, who loved and mourned his father.
But I cannot help being sorry for Leonard. I hope he is not going to be in a hurry. You were only nineteen last birthday. But I told him I was sure you would not like that. Hamleigh might buy a place. No, Belle, I am not foolish enough to suppose that you and Mr. Hamleigh are to settle for life at the end of the world.
This house shall be your home whenever you choose to occupy it; and I hope you will come and stay with me sometimes, for I shall be very lonely without you. Our modern Ruths go where their lovers go, and worship the same gods. I will try to rejoice in your happiness. She had said no word of that early doom of which Angus had told her. For worlds she could not have revealed that fatal truth. She had tried to put away every thought of it while she talked with her aunt. Angus had urged her beforehand to be perfectly frank, to tell Mrs. Tregonell what a mere wreck of a life it was which her lover offered her: We will bear our sorrow together.
God, who has made me so happy by the gift of your love, will not take you from me. If—if your life is to be brief, mine will not be long. I think it would be wiser—better, to tell your aunt everything. The ice once broken, everybody reconciled herself or himself to the new aspect of affairs at Mount Royal.
In less than a week it seemed the most natural thing in life that Angus and Christabel should be engaged. There was no marked change in their mode of life. With Major Bree for their skipper, and a brace of sturdy boatmen, Angus, Christabel, and Jessie Bridgeman spent several mild October mornings on the sea—now towards Cambeak, anon towards Trebarwith. Tintagel from the beach was infinitely grander than Tintagel in its landward aspect.
Hamleigh showed no lack of agility or daring. His health had improved marvellously in that invigorating air. Christabel, noteful of every change of hue in the beloved face, saw how much more healthy a tinge cheek and brow had taken since Mr. Hamleigh came to Mount Royal. He had no longer the exhausted look or the languid air of a man who had untimely squandered his stock of life and health.
His eye had brightened—with no hectic light, but with the clear sunshine of a mind at ease.
He was altered in every way for the better. And now the autumn evenings were putting on a wintry air—the lights were twinkling early in the Alpine street of Boscastle. Hamleigh had been nearly two months at Mount Royal, and he told himself that it was time for leave-taking. Tregonell had been very gracious in her consent to his betrothal, so he could not disobey her. But she ought to know a little more of society before she has to enter it as your wife.
In point of fact, the London chaperon has dwindled into a formula, and no doubt she will soon be improved off the face of society. I have been thinking that it would be better for you and Christabel to be married in London. The law business would be easier settled—and you may have relations and friends who would like to be at your wedding, yet who would hardly care to come to Boscastle.
They think nothing of going to the Engadine, yet grumble consumedly at a journey of a dozen hours in their native land—as if England were not worth the exertion. This being settled, Mrs. Tregonell wrote at once to her agent, with instructions to set the old house in Bolton Row in order for the season immediately after Easter, and Christabel and her lover had to reconcile their minds to the idea of a long dreary winter of severance.
Miss Courtenay had grown curiously grave and thoughtful since her engagement—a change which Jessie, who watched her closely, observed with some surprise. It seemed as if she had passed from girlhood into womanhood in the hour in which she pledged herself to Angus Hamleigh. She had for ever done with the thoughtless gaiety of youth that knows not care. She had taken upon herself the burden of an anxious, self-sacrificing love.
With this ever-present consciousness of a fatal future, went the desire to make her lover forget his doom, and the ardent hope that the sentence might be revoked—that the doom pronounced by human judgment might yet be reversed. Indeed, Angus had himself begun to make light of his malady. Who could tell that the famous physician was not a false prophet, after all? The same dire announcement of untimely death had been made to Leigh Hunt, who contrived somehow—not always in the smoothest waters—to steer his frail bark into the haven of old age.
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Angus spoke of this, hopefully, to Christabel, as they loitered within the roofless crumbling walls of the ancient oratory above St. Mertheriana in Minster Churchyard. You have made me happy, and what can cure a man better than perfect bliss. But, oh, my darling! And you are not going back to London—at least not to stop there. You are going to the South of France. Why should any one, who has liberty and plenty of money, spend his winter in a smoky city, where the fog blinds and stifles him, and the frost pinches him, and the damp makes him miserable, when he can have blue skies, and sunshine and flowers, and ever so much brighter stars, a few hundred miles away?
We are bound to obey each other, are we not, Angus? Is not that among our marriage vows? I am prepared to become an awful example of a henpecked husband. If you say I am to go southward, with the swallows, I will go—yea, verily, to Algeria or Tunis, if you insist: Will you do this, for my sake, Angus? They could hear the rush of the waterfall in the deep green hollow below them, and the faint flutter of loosely hanging leaves, stirred lightly by the light wind, and far away the joyous bark of a sheep-dog.
No human voices, save their own, disturbed the autumnal stillness. Indeed, if I am not to be here, I might just as well be in the South; nay, much better than in London, or Paris, both of which cities I know by heart. I have been reading about the climate in the South of France, and I am sure, if you are careful, a winter there will do you worlds of good. Was that what you were going to say, Belle? My past life is a worthless husk that I have done with for ever.
The Easter recess was over. Society had returned from its brief holiday—its glimpse of budding hedges and primrose-dotted banks, blue skies and blue violets, the snowy bloom of orchards, the tender green of young cornfields. To sit in the Green Park on a mild April morning, to see the guard turn out by St. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman perceived the change in him. How strange the road of life is, and how little a man knows what is waiting for him round the corner. The house in Bolton Row was charming; just large enough to be convenient, just small enough to be snug. The house was furnished in a Georgian style, pleasant to modern taste.
The drawing-room was of the spindle-legged order—satin-wood card tables; groups of miniatures in oval frames; Japanese folding screen, behind which Belinda might have played Bo-peep; china jars, at whose fall Narcissa might have inly suffered, while outwardly serene. The dining-room was sombre and substantial. The bedrooms had been improved by modern upholstery; for the sleeping apartments of our ancestors leave a good deal to be desired.
All the windows were full of flowers—inside and out there was the perfume and colour of many blossoms.
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The three drawing-rooms, growing smaller to a diminishing point, like a practical lesson in perspective, were altogether charming. Long as he had been away from London, he acclimatized himself very quickly—found out everything about everybody—what singers were best worth hearing—what plays best worth seeing—what actors should be praised—which pictures should be looked at and talked about—what horses were likely to win the notable races.
He was a walking guide, a living hand-book to fashionable London. Christabel wanted to see everything. Nor was she particularly interested in the leaders of fashion, their ways and manners—the newest professed or professional beauty—the last social scandal. She wanted to see the great city of which she had read in history—the Tower, the Savoy, Westminster Hall, the Abbey, St. Squeers put up—had charms for her. Yet there still remained enough to fill her mind with solemn thoughts of the past. She spent long hours in the Abbey, with Angus and Jessie, looking at the monuments, and recalling the lives and deeds of long vanished heroes and statesmen.
The Tower, and the old Inns of Court, were full of interest. Her curiosity about old houses and streets was insatiable. They had been prowling about the Whitehall end of the town in the bright early morning, before Fashion had begun to stir herself faintly among her down pillows. Christabel loved the parks and streets while the freshness of sunrise was still upon them—and these early walks were an institution. Here Fenella danced before good-natured, loose-living Rowley.
Here Nigel stood aside, amidst the crowd, to see Charles, Prince of Wales, and his ill-fated favourite, Buckingham, go by. Here the Citizen of the World met Beau Tibbs and the gentleman in black. For Christabel, the Park was like a scene in a stage play. Then, after breakfast, there were long drives into fair suburban haunts, where they escaped in some degree from London smoke and London restraints of all kinds, where they could charter a boat, and row up the river to a still fairer scene, and picnic in some rushy creek, out of ken of society, and be almost as recklessly gay as if they had been at Tintagel.
These were the days Angus loved best.
The days upon which he and his betrothed turned their backs upon London society, and seemed as far away from the outside world as ever they had been upon the wild western coast. Like most men educated at Eton and Oxford, and brought up in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, Angus loved the Thames with a love that was almost a passion. All the pleasantest associations of my boyhood and youth are interwoven with the river.
He knew every bend and reach of the river—every tributary, creek, and eyot—almost every row of pollard willows, standing stunted and grim along the bank, like a line of rugged old men. He knew where the lilies grew, and where there were chances of trout. The haunts of monster pike were familiar to him—indeed, he declared that he knew many of these gentlemen personally—that they were as old as the Fontainebleau carp, and bore a charmed life.
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If I had caught him I should have worn his skin ever after, in the pride of my heart—like Hercules with his lion. But he still inhabits the same creek, still sulks among the same rushes, and devours the gentler members of the finny race by shoals. We christened him Dr. Parr, for we knew he was preternaturally old, and we thought he must, from mere force of association, be a profound scholar. Hamleigh was always finding reasons for these country excursions, which he declared were the one sovereign antidote for the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms, and the evil effects of late hours.
Tregonell wanted her niece to make a round of London visits, instead of going down to Maidenhead on the coach, to lunch somewhere up the river. It would be a crime to waste such sunlight and such balmy air in town drawing-rooms. Could not you strain a point, dear Mrs. Tregonell, and come with us? Aunt Diana shook her head. No, the fatigue would be too much—she had lived such a quiet life at Mount Royal, that a very little exertion tired her. This and Miss That—and Mrs. Hamleigh had his own way, and carried off Christabel and Miss Bridgeman to the White Horse Cellar, with the faithful Major in attendance.
Tregonell, impressively, as they were departing. You are the only sober person in the party. I believe Jessie Bridgeman is as wild as a hawk, when she gets out of my sight. Tregonell, while they all waited on the threshold for Christabel to fasten her eight-button gloves—a delicate operation, in which she was assisted by Mr.
Happily, Christabel was engaged at this moment in kissing her aunt, and did not observe Mr. Ten minutes later they were all seated outside the coach, bowling down Piccadilly Hill on their way westward. Christabel, when I die, if you have the ordering of my funeral, be sure that I am buried in Minster Churchyard. I think we all feel sorrier for him than for many a better man. In the early afternoon they had reached their destination—a lovely creek shaded by chestnut and alder—a spot known to few, and rarely visited. Never had Angus looked better, or talked more gaily.
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Jessie, too, was at her brightest, and had a great deal to say. I can see it in her face. But after this Miss Bridgeman became more silent, and gave way much less than usual to those sudden impulses of sharp speech which Christabel had noticed. They landed presently, and went wandering away into the inland—a strange world to Christabel, albeit very familiar to her lover.
I have been surfeited with hot-house flowers and caged canaries since I came to London. A skylark was singing in the deep blue, far aloft, over the little wood in which they were wandering. It was the loneliest, loveliest spot; and Christabel felt as if it would be agony to leave it. She and her lover seemed ever so much nearer, dearer, more entirely united here than in London drawing-rooms, where she hardly dared to be civil to him lest society should be amused or contemptuous.
Here she could cling to his arm—it seemed a strong and helpful arm now—and look up at his face with love irradiating her own countenance, and feel no more ashamed than Eve in the Garden. Here they could talk without fear of being heard; for Jessie and the Major followed at a most respectful distance—just keeping the lovers in view, and no more.
Angus says the train goes at six. We have two hours in which to do what we like. And then she and her lover went rambling on, talking, laughing, poetising under the flickering shadows and glancing lights; while the other two followed at a leisurely pace, like the dull foot of reality following the winged heel of romance.
Jessie Bridgeman had been old in care before she left off pinafores. Her childish pleasure in the shabbiest of dolls had been poisoned by a precocious familiarity with poor-rates, and water-rates—a sickening dread of the shabby man in pepper-and-salt tweed, with the end of an oblong account-book protruding from his breast-pocket, who came to collect money that was never ready for him, and departed, leaving a printed notice, like the trail of the serpent, behind him. Once in a year or so Mr. Bridgeman gave his wife and eldest girl a dinner at an Italian Restaurant near Leicester Square—a cheap little pinchy dinner, in which the meagre modicum of meat and poultry was eked out by much sauce, redolent of garlic, by delicious foreign bread, and too-odorous foreign cheese.
It was a tradition in the family that Mr. Bridgeman had been a great dinner-giver in his bachelor days, and knew every restaurant in London. Salary, thirty pounds per annum. It was not the first advertisement by many that Jessie had answered. Indeed, she seemed, to her own mind, to have been doing nothing but answering advertisements, and hoping against hope for a favourable reply, since her eighteenth birthday, when it had been borne in upon her, as the Evangelicals say, that she ought to go out into the world, and do something for her living, making one mouth less to be filled from the family bread-pan.
I have a dreadfully healthy appetite, and if I could get a decent situation I should cost you nothing, and should be able to send you half my salary. But you would want all the money for your dress: These two facts favourably impressed Mrs. For days after her arrival Jessie felt as if she must be walking about in a dream. The elegancies and luxuries of life were all new to her. The perfect quiet and order of this country home; the beauty in every detail—from the old silver urn and Worcester china which greeted her eyes on the breakfast-table, to the quaint little Queen Anne candlestick which she carried up to her bedroom at night—seemed like a revelation of a hitherto unknown world.
The face of Nature—the hills and the moors—the sea and the cliffs—was as new to her as all that indoor luxury. Happily, she was not a shy or awkward young person. Often in this paradise of pasties and clotted cream, mountain mutton and barn-door fowls, she thought with a bitter pang of the hungry circle at home, with whom dinner was the exception rather than the rule, and who made believe to think tea and bloaters an ever so much cosier meal than a formal repast of roast and boiled.
Nor did she forget her promise to send the over-tasked house-mother half her earnings. Tregonell has given me a lovely grey silk gown; and I have bought a brown merino at Launceston, and a new hat and jacket. You would stare to see how splendidly your homely little Jessie is dressed! Christabel found out the date of my birthday, and gave me a dozen of the loveliest gloves, my favourite grey, with four buttons.
Did you ever see a dozen of gloves all at once, mother? You have no idea how lovely they look. I quite shrink from breaking into the packet; but I must wear a pair at church next Sunday, in compliment to the dear little giver. If it were not for thoughts of you and the brood, dearest, I should be intensely happy here! The house is an ideal house—the people are ideal people; and they treat me ever so much better than I deserve. I think I have the knack of being useful to them, which is a great comfort; and I am able to get on with the servants—old servants who had a great deal too much of their own way before I came—which is also a comfort.
It is not easy to introduce reform without making oneself detested. Christabel, who has been steeping herself in French history lately, calls me Turgot in petticoats—by which you will see she has a high opinion of my ministerial talents—if you can remember Turgot, poor dear! This and much more had Jessie Bridgeman written seven years ago, while Mount Royal was still new to her. The place and the people—at least those two whom she first knew there—had grown dearer as time went on.
In vain did his mother plead for her favourite. I wonder you are so shortsighted! Tregonell was in her love for her son, she was too staunch to be set against a person she liked by any such assertions as these. I was always Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a very small exchequer; but I learnt the habit of spending and managing, and keeping accounts.
While active and busy about domestic affairs, verifying accounts, settling supplies and expenditures with the cook-housekeeper, making herself a veritable clerk of the kitchen, and overlooking the housemaids in the finer details of their work, Miss Bridgeman still found ample leisure for the improvement of her mind. They learnt German together, they read good French books together, and were companions in the best sense of the word.
It was a happy life—monotonous, uneventful, but a placid, busy, all-satisfying life, which Jessie Bridgeman led during those six years and a half which went before the advent of Angus Hamleigh at Mount Royal. 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.
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. It is a terrible story! 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.
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. 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.
Hamleigh is worthy of her? The present and the future are what we have to consider. If a man is to be judged by his history, where would David be, I should like to know? Hamleigh was never as bad as David. Napoleon the First did a good many queer things; but you would not get a monarch and a commander-inchief 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. 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:. 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.
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! 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. 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. I made up my mind about that, oh! Indeed, I never expected to be asked, if the truth must be told. 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. I shall soon be going down on the other side.
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. If I could only make you happy! 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.