Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3

They were driving along the avenue by this time, the stout chestnut cob going gaily in the fresh morning air – Mr. Hamleigh sitting face to face with Christabel as she drove. What a fair face it was in the clear light of day! How pure and delicate every tone, from the whiteness of the lily to the bloom of the wild rose! How innocent the expression of the large liquid eyes, which seemed to smile at him as he talked! He had known so many pretty women – his memory was like a gallery of beautiful faces; but he could recall no face so completely innocent, so divinely young. "It is the youthfulness of an unsullied mind," he said to himself; "I have known plenty of girls as young in years, but not one perfectly pure from the taint of worldliness and vanity. The trail of the serpent was over them all!"

They drove down hill into Boscastle, and then straightway began to ascend still steeper hills upon the other side of the harbour.

"You ought to throw a viaduct across the valley," said Mr. Hamleigh – "something like Brunel's bridge at Saltash; but perhaps you have hardly traffic enough to make it pay."

They went winding up the new road to Trevena, avoiding the village street, and leaving the Church of the Silent Tower on its windy height on their right hand. The wide Atlantic lay far below them on the other side of those green fields which bordered the road; the air they breathed was keen with the soft breath of the sea. But autumn had hardly plucked a leaf from the low storm-beaten trees, or a flower from the tall hedgerows, where the red blossom of the Ragged Robin mixed with the pale gold of the hawk-weed, and the fainter yellow of the wild cistus. The ferns had hardly begun to wither, and Angus Hamleigh, whose last experiences had been among the stone walls of Aberdeenshire, wondered at the luxuriance of this western world, where the banks were built up and fortified with boulders of marble-veined spar.

They drove through the village of Trevalga, in which there is never an inn or public-house of any kind – not even a cottage licensed for the sale of beer. There was the wheelwright, carpenter, builder, Jack-of-all-trades, with his shed and his yard – the blacksmith, with his forge going merrily – village school – steam threshing-machine at work – church – chapel; but never a drop of beer – and yet the people at Trevalga are healthy, and industrious, and decently clad, and altogether comfortable looking.

"Some day we will take you to call at the Rectory," said Christabel, pointing skywards with her whip.

"Do you mean that the Rector has gone to Heaven?" asked Angus, looking up into the distant blue; "or is there any earthly habitation higher than the road on which we are driving."

"Didn't you see the end of the lane, just now?" asked Christabel, laughing; "it is rather steep – an uphill walk all the way; but the views are lovely."

"We will walk to the Rectory to-morrow," said Miss Bridgeman; "this lazy mode of transit must not be tolerated after to-day."

Even the drive to Trevena was not all idleness; for after they had passed the entrance to the path leading to the beautiful waterfall of St. Nectan's Kieve, hard by St. Piran's chapel and well – the former degraded to a barn, and the latter, once of holy repute, now chiefly useful as a cool repository for butter from the neighbouring dairy of Trethevy Farm – they came to a hill, which had to be walked down; to the lowest depth of the Rocky Valley, where a stone bridge spans the rapid brawling stream that leaps as a waterfall into the gorge at St. Nectan's Kieve, about a mile higher up the valley. And then they came to a corresponding hill, which had to be walked up – because in either case it was bad for the cob to have a weight behind him. Indeed, the cob was so accustomed to consideration in this matter, that he made a point of stopping politely for his people to alight at either end of anything exceptional in the way of a hill.

"I'm afraid you spoil your pony," said Mr. Hamleigh, throwing the reins over his arm, and resigning himself to a duty which made him feel very much like a sea-side flyman, earning his day's wages toilsomely, and saving his horse with a view to future fares.

"Better that than to spoil you," answered Miss Bridgeman, as she and Christabel walked briskly beside him. "But if you fasten the reins to the dashboard, you may trust Felix."

"Won't he run away?"

"Not he," answered Christabel. "He knows that he would never be so happy with anybody else as he is with us."

"But mightn't he take a fancy for a short run; just far enough to allow of his reducing that dainty little carriage to match-wood? A well-fed underworked pony so thoroughly enjoys that kind of thing."

"Felix has no such diabolical suggestions. He is a conscientious person, and knows his duty. Besides, he is not underworked. There is hardly a day that he does not carry us somewhere."

Mr. Hamleigh surrendered the reins, and Felix showed himself worthy of his mistress's confidence, following at her heels like a dog, with his honest brown eyes fixed on the slim tall figure, as if it had been his guiding star.

"I want you to admire the landscape," said Christabel, when they were on the crest of the last hill; "is not that a lovely valley?"

Mr. Hamleigh willingly admitted the fact. The beauty of a pastoral landscape, with just enough of rugged wildness for the picturesque, could go no further.

"Creswick has immortalized yonder valley by his famous picture of the mill," said Miss Bridgeman, "but the romantic old mill of the picture has lately been replaced by that large ungainly building, quite out of keeping with its surroundings."

"Have you ever been in Switzerland?" asked Angus of Christabel, when they had stood for some moments in silent contemplation of the landscape.

"Never."

"Nor in Italy?"

"No. I have never been out of England. Since I was five years old I have hardly spent a year of my life out of Cornwall."

"Happy Cornwall, which can show so fair a product of its soil! Well, Miss Courtenay, I know Italy and Switzerland by heart, and I like this Cornish landscape better than either. It is not so beautiful – it would not do as well for a painter or a poet; but it comes nearer an Englishman's heart. What can one have better than the hills and the sea? Switzerland can show you bigger hills, ghostly snow-shrouded pinnacles that mock the eye, following each other like a line of phantoms, losing themselves in the infinite; but Switzerland cannot show you that."

He pointed to the Atlantic: the long undulating line of the coast, rocky, rugged, yet verdant, with many a curve and promontory, many a dip and rise.

"It is the most everlasting kind of beauty, is it not?" asked Christabel, delighted at this little gush of warm feeling in one whose usual manner was so equable. "One could never tire of the sea. And I am always proud to remember that our sea is so big – stretching away and away to the New World. I should have liked it still better before the days of Columbus, when it led to the unknown!"

"Ah!" sighed Angus, "youth always yearns for the undiscovered. Middle age knows that there is nothing worth discovering!"

On the top of the hill they paused for a minute or so to contemplate the ancient Borough of Bossiney, which, until disfranchised in 1832, returned two members to Parliament, with a constituency of little more than a dozen, and which once had Sir Francis Drake for its representative. Here Mr. Hamleigh beheld that modest mound called the Castle Hill, on the top of which it was customary to read the writs before the elections.

An hour later they were eating their luncheon on that windy height where once stood the castle of the great king. To Christabel the whole story of Arthur and his knights was as real as if it had been a part of her own life. She had Tennyson's Arthur and Tennyson's Lancelot in her heart of hearts, and knew just enough of Sir Thomas Mallory's prose to give substance to the Laureate's poetic shadows. Angus amused himself a little at her expense, as they ate their chicken and salad on the grassy mounds which were supposed to be the graves of heroes who died before Athelstane drove the Cornish across the Tamar, and made his victorious progress through the country, even to the Scilly Isles, after defeating Howel, the last King of Cornwall.

"Do you really think that gentlemanly creature in the Laureate's epic – that most polished and perfect and most intensely modern English gentleman, self-contained, considerate of others, always the right man in the right place – is one whit like that half-naked sixth century savage – the real Arthur – whose Court costume was a coat of blue paint, and whose war-shriek was the yell of a Red Indian? What can be more futile than our setting up any one Arthur, and bowing the knee before him, in the face of the fact that Great Britain teems with monuments of Arthurs – Arthur's Seat in Scotland, Arthur's Castle in Wales, Arthur's Round Table here, there, and everywhere? Be sure that Arthur – Ardheer – the highest chief – was a generic name for the princes of those days, and that there were more Arthurs than ever there were Cæsars."

"I don't believe one word you say," exclaimed Christabel, indignantly, "there was only one Arthur, the son of Uther and Ygerne, who was born in the castle that stood on this very cliff, on the first night of the year, and carried away in secret by Merlin, and reared in secret by Sir Anton's wife – the brave good Arthur – the Christian king – who was killed at the battle of Camlan, near Slaughter Bridge, and was buried at Glastonbury."

"And embalmed by Tennyson. The Laureate invented Arthur – he took out a patent for the Round Table, and his invention is only a little less popular than that other product of the age, the sewing-machine. How many among modern tourists would care about Tintagel if Tennyson had not revived the old legend?"

The butler had put up a bottle of champagne for Mr. Hamleigh – the two ladies drinking nothing but sparkling water – and in this beverage he drank hail to the spirit of the legendary prince.

"I am ready to believe anything now you have me up here," he said, "for I have a shrewd idea that without your help I should never be able to get down again. I should live and die on the top of this rocky promontory – sweltering in the summer sun – buffeted by the winter winds – an unwilling Simeon Stylites."

"Do you know that the very finest sheep in Cornwall are said to be grown on that island," said Miss Bridgeman gravely, pointing to the grassy top of the isolated crag in the foreground, whereon once stood the donjon keep. "I don't know why it should be so, but it is a tradition."

"Among butchers?" said Angus. "I suppose even butchers have their traditions. And the poor sheep who are condemned to exile on that lonely rock – the St. Helena of their woolly race – do they know that they are achieving a posthumous perfection – that they are straining towards the ideal in butcher's meat? There is room for much thought in the question."

"The tide is out," said Christabel, looking seaward; "I think we ought to do Trebarwith sands to-day."

"Is Trebarwith another of your lions?" asked Angus, placidly.

"Yes."

"Then, please save him for to-morrow. Let me drink the cup of pleasure to the dregs where we are. This champagne has a magical taste, like the philter which Tristan and Iseult were so foolish as to drink while they sailed across from Ireland to this Cornish shore. Don't be alarmed, Miss Bridgeman, I am not going to empty the bottle. I am not an educated tourist – have read neither Black nor Murray, and I am very slow about taking in ideas. Even after all you have told me, I am not clear in my mind as to which is the castle and which the chapel, and which the burial-ground. Let us finish the afternoon dawdling about Tintagel. Let us see the sun set from this spot, where Arthur must so often have watched it, if the men of thirteen hundred years ago ever cared to watch the sun setting, which I doubt. They belong to the night-time of the world, when civilization was dead in Southern Europe, and was yet unborn in the West. Let us dawdle about till it is time to drive back to Mount Royal, and then I shall carry away an impression. I am very slow at taking impressions."

"I think you want us to believe that you are stupid," said Christabel, laughing at the earnestness with which he pleaded.

"Believe me, no. I should like you to think me ever so much better than I am. Please, let us dawdle."

They dawdled accordingly. Strolling about upon the short sea-beaten grass, so treacherous and slippery a surface in summer time, when fierce Sol has been baking it. They stumbled against the foundations of long-vanished walls, they speculated upon fragments of cyclopean masonry, and talked a great deal about the traditions of the spot.

Christabel, who had all the old authorities – Leland, Carew, and Norden – at her fingers' ends, was delighted to expound the departed glories of this British fortress. She showed where the ancient dungeon keep had reared its stony walls upon that "high terrible crag, environed with the sea; and how there had once been a drawbridge uniting yonder cliff with the buildings on the mainland" – now divorced, as Carew says, "by the downfallen steep cliffs, on the farther side, which, though it shut out the sea from his wonted recourse, hath yet more strengthened the island; for in passing thither you must first descend with a dangerous declining, and then make a worse ascent by a path, through his stickleness occasioning, and through his steepness threatening, the ruin of your life, with the falling of your foot." She told Mr. Hamleigh how, after the Conquest, the castle was the occasional residence of some of our Princes, and how Richard, King of the Romans, Earl of Cornwall, son of King John, entertained here his nephew David, Prince of Wales, how, in Richard the Second's time, this stronghold was made a State prison, and how a certain Lord Mayor of London was, for his unruly mayoralty, condemned thither as a perpetual penitentiary; which seems very hard upon the chief magistrate of the city, who thus did vicarious penance for the riot of his brief reign.

And then they talked of Tristan and Iseult, and the tender old love-story, which lends the glamour of old-world fancies to those bare ruins of a traditional past. Christabel knew the old chronicle through Matthew Arnold's poetical version, which gives only the purer and better side of the character of the Knight and Chatelaine, at the expense of some of the strongest features of the story. Who, that knew that romantic legend, could linger on that spot without thinking of King Marc's faithless queen! Assuredly not Mr. Hamleigh, who was a staunch believer in the inventor of "sweetness and light," and who knew Arnold's verses by heart.

"What have they done with the flowers and the terrace walks?" he said, – "the garden where Tristan and his Queen basked in the sunshine of their days; and where they parted for ever? —

"'All the spring time of their loveIs already gone and past,And instead thereof is seenIts winter, which endureth still Tyntagel,on its surge-beat hill,The pleasaunce walks, the weeping queen,The flying leaves, the straining blast,And that long wild kiss – their last.'

And where – oh, where – are those graves in the King's chapel in which the tyrant Marc, touched with pity, ordered the fated lovers to be buried? And, behold! out of the grave of Tristan there sprung a plant which went along the walls, and descended into the grave of the Queen, and though King Marc three several times ordered this magical creeper to be cut off root and branch, it was always found growing again next morning, as if it were the very spirit of the dead knight struggling to get free from the grave, and to be with his lady-love again! Show me those tombs, Miss Courtenay."

"You can take your choice," said Jessie Bridgeman, pointing to a green mound or two, overgrown with long rank grass, in that part of the hill which was said to be the kingly burial-place. "But as for your magical tree, there is not so much as a bramble to do duty for poor Tristan."

"If I were Duke of Cornwall and Lord of Tintagel Castle, I would put up a granite cross in memory of the lovers; though I fear there was very little Christianity in either of them," said Angus.

"And I would come once a year and hang a garland on it," said Christabel, smiling at him with

"Eyes of deep, soft, lucent hue —Eyes too expressive to be blue,Too lovely to be grey."

He had recalled those lines more than once when he looked into Christabel's eyes.

Mr. Hamleigh had read so much as to make him an interesting talker upon any subject; but Christabel and Jessie noticed that of his own life, his ways and amusements, his friends, his surroundings, he spoke hardly at all. This fact Christabel noticed with wonder, Jessie with suspicion. If a man led a good wholesome life, he would surely be more frank and open – he would surely have more to say about himself and his associates.

They dawdled, and dawdled, till past four o'clock, and to none of the three did the hours so spent seem long; but they found that it would make them too late in their return to Mount Royal were they to wait for sundown before they turned their faces homewards; so while the day was still bright, Mr. Hamleigh consented to be guided by steep and perilous paths to the base of the rocky citadel, and then they strolled back to the Wharncliffe Arms, where Felix had been enjoying himself in the stable, and was now desperately anxious to get home, rattling up and down hill at an alarming rate, and not hinting at anybody's alighting to walk.

This was only one of many days spent in the same fashion. They walked next day to Trebarwith sands, up and down hills, which Mr. Hamleigh declared were steeper than anything he had ever seen in Switzerland; but he survived the walk, and his spirits seemed to rise with the exertion. This time Major Bree went with them – a capital companion for a country ramble, being just enough of a botanist, archæologist, and geologist, to leaven the lump of other people's ignorance, without being obnoxiously scientific. Mr. Hamleigh was delighted with that noble stretch of level sand, with the long rollers of the Atlantic tumbling in across the low rocks, and the bold headlands behind – spot beloved of marine painters – spot where the gulls and the shags hold their revels, and where man feels himself but a poor creature face to face with the lonely grandeur of sea, and cliff, and sky.

So rarely is that long stretch of yellow sand vulgarized by the feet of earth's multitudes, that one half expects to see a procession of frolicsome sea-nymphs come dancing out of yonder cave, and wind in circling measures towards the crested wavelets, gliding in so softly under the calm clear day.

These were halcyon days – an Indian summer – balmy western zephyrs – sunny noontides – splendid sunsets – altogether the most beautiful autumn season that Angus Hamleigh had known, or at least, so it seemed to him – nay, even more than this, surely the most beautiful season of his life.

As the days went on, and day after day was spent in Christabel's company – almost as it were alone with her, for Miss Bridgeman and Major Bree were but as figures in the background – Angus felt as if he were at the beginning of a new life – a life filled with fresh interests, thoughts, hopes, desires, unknown and undreamed of in the former stages of his being. Never before had he lived a life so uneventful – never before had he been so happy. It surprised him to discover how simple are the elements of real content – how deep the charm of a placid existence among thoroughly loveable people! Christabel Courtenay was not the loveliest woman he had ever known, nor the most elegant, nor the most accomplished, nor the most fascinating; but she was entirely different from all other women with whom his lot had been cast. Her innocence, her unsophisticated enjoyment of all earth's purest joys, her transparent purity, her perfect trustfulness – these were to him as a revelation of a new order of beings. If he had been told of such a woman he would have shrugged his shoulders misbelievingly, or would have declared that she must be an idiot. But Christabel was quite as clever as those brilliant creatures whose easy manners had enchanted him in days gone by. She was better educated than many a woman he knew who passed for a wit of the first order. She had read more, thought more, was more sympathetic, more companionable, and she was delightfully free from self-consciousness or vanity.

He found himself talking to Christabel as he had never talked to any one else since those early days at the University, the bright dawn of manhood, when he confided freely in that second self, the chosen friend of the hour, and believed that all men lived and moved according to his own boyish standard of honour. He talked to her, not of the actualities of his life, but of his thoughts and feelings – his dreamy speculations upon the gravest problems which hedge round the secret of man's final destiny. He talked freely of his doubts and difficulties, and the half-belief which came so near unbelief – the wide love of all creation – the vague yet passionate yearning for immortality which fell so far short of the Gospel's sublime certainty. He revealed to her all the complexities of a many-sided mind, and she never failed him in sympathy and understanding. This was in their graver moods, when by some accidental turn of the conversation they fell into the discussion of those solemn questions which are always at the bottom of every man and woman's thoughts, like the unknown depths of a dark water-pool. For the most part their talk was bright and light as those sunny autumn days, varied as the glorious and ever-changing hues of sky and sea at sunset. Jessie was a delightful companion. She was so thoroughly easy herself that it was impossible to feel ill at ease with her. She played her part of confidante so pleasantly, seeming to think it the most natural thing in the world that those two should be absorbed in each other, and should occasionally lapse into complete forgetfulness of her existence. Major Bree when he joined in their rambles was obviously devoted to Jessie Bridgeman. It was her neatly gloved little hand which he was eager to clasp at the crossing of a stile, and where the steepness of the hill-side path gave him an excuse for assisting her. It was her stout little boot which he guided so tenderly, where the ways were ruggedest. Never had a plain woman a more respectful admirer – never was beauty in her peerless zenith more devoutly worshipped!

And so the autumn days sped by, pleasantly for all: with deepest joy – joy ever waxing, never waning – for those two who had found the secret of perfect sympathy in thought and feeling. It was not for Angus Hamleigh the first passion of a spotless manhood; and yet the glamour and the delight were as new as if he had never loved before. He had never so purely, so reverently loved. The passion was of a new quality. It seemed to him as if he had ascended into a higher sphere in the universe, and had given his heart to a creature of a loftier race.

"Perhaps it is the good old lineage which makes the difference," he said to himself once, while his feelings were still sufficiently novel and so far under his control as to be subject to analysis. "The women I have cared for in days gone by have hardly got over their early affinity with the gutter; or when I have admired a woman of good family she has been steeped to the lips in worldliness and vanity."

Mr. Hamleigh, who had told himself that he was going to be intensely bored at Mount Royal, had been Mrs. Tregonell's guest for three weeks, and it seemed to him as if the time were brief and beautiful as one of those rare dreams of impossible bliss which haunt our waking memories, and make actual life dull and joyless by contrast with the glory of shadowland. No word had yet been spoken – nay, at the very thought of those words which most lovers in his position would have been eager to speak, his soul sickened and his cheek paled; for there would be no joyfulness in the revelation of his love – indeed, he doubted whether he had the right to reveal it – whether duty and honour did not alike constrain him to keep his converse within the strict limits of friendship, to bid Christabel good-bye, and turn his back upon Mount Royal, without having said one word more than a friend might speak. Happy as Christabel had been with him – tenderly as she loved him – she was far too innocent to have considered herself ill-treated in such a case. She would have blamed herself alone for the weakness of mind which had been unable to resist the fascination of his society – she would have blushed and wept in secret for her folly in having loved unwooed.