Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3

"No, no," gasped Dopsy, in a choked voice. "Please don't go away. I like you to be near me."

She put out her hand – a chilly, tremulous hand, with no passion in it save the passionate pain of despair, and touched his, timidly, entreatingly, as if she were calling upon him for pity and help. She was, indeed, in her inmost heart, asking him to rescue her from the great dismal swamp of poverty and disrepute: to take her to himself, and give her a place and status among well-bred people, and make her life worth living.

This was dreadful. Angus Hamleigh, in all the variety of his experience of womankind, had never before found himself face to face with this kind of difficulty. He had not been blind to Miss Vandeleur's strenuous endeavours to charm him. He had parried those light arrows lightly: but he was painfully embarrassed by this appeal to his compassion. It was a new thing for him to sit beside a weeping woman, whom he could neither love nor admire, but from whom he could not withhold his pity.

"I daresay her life is dismal enough," he thought, "with such a brother as Poker Vandeleur – and a father to match."

While he sat in silent embarrassment, and while Dopsy slowly dried her tears with a gaudy little coloured handkerchief, taken from a smart little breast-pocket in the tailor-gown, Mr. Tregonell sauntered across the room to the window where they sat – a Tudor window, with a deep embrasure.

"What are you two talking about in the dark?" he asked, as Dopsy confusedly shuffled the handkerchief back into the breast-pocket. "Something very sentimental, I should think, from the look of you. Poetry, I suppose."

Dopsy said not a word. She believed that Leonard meant well by her – that, if his influence could bring Mr. Hamleigh's nose to the grindstone, to the grindstone that nose would be brought. So she looked up at her brother's friend with a watery smile, and remained mute.

"We were talking about London and the theatres," answered Angus. "Not a very sentimental topic;" and then he got up and walked away with his teacup, to the table near which Christabel was sitting, in the flickering firelight, and seated himself by her side, and began to talk to her about a box of books that had arrived from London that day – books that were familiar to him and new to her. Leonard looked after him with a scowl, safe in the shadow; while Dopsy, feeling that she had made a fool of herself, lapsed again into tears.

"I am afraid he is behaving very badly to you," said Leonard.

"Oh, no, no. But he has such strange ways. He blows hot and cold."

"In plain words, he's a heartless flirt," answered Leonard, impatiently. "He has been fooled by a pack of women – pretends to be dying of consumption – gives himself no end of airs. He has flirted outrageously with you. Has he proposed?"

"No – not exactly," faltered Dopsy.

"Some one ought to bring him to the scratch. Your brother must tackle him."

"Don't you think if – if – Jack were to say anything – were just to hint that I was being made very unhappy – that such marked attentions before all the world put me in a false position – don't you think it might do harm?"

"Quite the contrary. It would do good. No man ought to trifle with a girl's feelings in that way. No man shall be allowed to do it in my house. If Jack won't speak to him, I will."

"Oh, Mr. Vandeleur, what a noble heart you have – what a true friend you have always been to us."

"You are my friend's sister – my wife's guest. I won't see you trifled with."

"And you really think his attentions have been marked?"

"Very much marked. He shall not be permitted to amuse himself at your expense. There he sits, talking sentiment to my wife – just as he has talked sentiment to you. Why doesn't he keep on the safe side, and confine his attentions to married women?"

"You are not jealous of him?" asked Dopsy, with some alarm.

"Jealous! I! It would take a very extraordinary kind of wife, and a very extraordinary kind of admirer of that wife, to make me jealous."

Dopsy felt her hopes in somewise revived by Mr. Tregonell's manner of looking at things. Up to this point she had mistrusted exceedingly that the flirting was all on her side: but now Leonard most distinctly averred that Angus Hamleigh had flirted, and in a manner obvious to every one. And if Mr. Hamleigh really admired her – if he were really blowing hot and cold – inclining one day to make her his wife, and on another day disposed to let her languish and fade in South Belgravia – might not a word or two from a judicious friend turn the scale, and make her happy for life.

She went up to her room to dress in a flutter of hope and fear; so agitated, that she could scarcely manage the more delicate details of her toilet – the drapery of her skirt, the adjustment of the sunflower on her shoulder.

"How flushed and shaky you are," exclaimed Mopsy, pausing in the pencilling of an eyebrow to look at her sister. "Is the deed done? Has he popped?"

"No, he has not popped. But I think he will."

"I wish I were of your opinion. I should like a rich sister. It would be the next best thing to being well off oneself."

"You only think of his money," said Dopsy, who had really fallen in love – for only about the fifteenth time, so there was still freshness in the feeling – "I should care for him just as much if he were a pauper."

"No; you would not," said Mopsy. "I daresay you think you would, but you wouldn't. There is a glamour about money which nobody in our circumstances can resist. A man who dresses perfectly – who has never been hard up – who has always lived among elegant people – there is a style about him that goes straight to one's heart. Don't you remember how in "Peter Wilkins" there are different orders of beings – a superior class – born so, bred so – always apart and above the others. Mr. Hamleigh belongs to that higher order. If he were poor and shabby he would be a different person. You wouldn't care twopence for him."

The Rector of Trevalga and his wife dined at Mount Royal that evening, so Dopsy fell to the lot of Mr. Hamleigh, and had plenty of opportunity of carrying on the siege during dinner, while Mrs. Tregonell and the Rector, who was an enthusiastic antiquarian, talked of the latest discoveries in Druidic remains.

After dinner came the usual adjournment to billiards. The Rector and his wife stayed in the drawing-room with Christabel and Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh would have remained with them, but Leonard specially invited him to the billiard-room.

"You must have had enough Mendelssohn and Beethoven to last you for the next six months," he said. "You had better come and have a smoke with us."

"I could never have too much good music," answered Angus.

"Well, I don't suppose you'd get much to night. The Rector and my wife will talk about pots and pans all the evening, now they've once started. You may as well be sociable, for once-in-a-way, and come with us."

Such an invitation, given in heartiest tones, and with seeming frankness, could hardly be refused. So Angus went across the hall with the rest of the billiard players, to the fine old room, once a chapel, in which there was space enough for settees, and easy chairs, tea-tables, books, flowers, and dogs, without the slightest inconvenience to the players.

"You'll play, Hamleigh?" said Leonard.

"No, thanks; I'd rather sit and smoke and watch you."

"Really! Then Monty and I will play Jack and one of the girls. Billiards is the only game at which one can afford to play against relations – they can't cheat. Mopsy, will you play? Dopsy can mark.'"

"What a thorough good fellow he is," thought Dopsy, charmed with an arrangement which left her comparatively free for flirtation with Mr. Hamleigh, who had taken possession of Christabel's favourite seat – a low capacious basket-chair – by the wide wood fire, and had Christabel's table near him, loaded with her books, and work-basket – those books which were all his favourites as well as hers, and which made an indissoluble link between them. What is mere blood relationship compared with the subtler tie of mutual likings and dislikings?

The men all lighted their cigarettes, and the game progressed with tolerably equal fortunes, Jack Vandeleur playing well enough to make amends for any lack of skill on the part of Mopsy, whose want of the scientific purpose and certainty which come from long experience, was as striking as her dashing and self-assured method of handling her cue, and her free use of all slang terms peculiar to the game. Dopsy oscillated between the marking-board and the fireplace – sometimes kneeling on the Persian rug to play with Randie and the other dogs, sometimes standing in a pensive attitude by the chimney-piece, talking to Angus. All traces of tears were gone. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes brightened by an artful touch of Indian ink under the lashes, her eyebrows accentuated by the same artistic treatment, her large fan held with the true Grosvenor Gallery air.

"Do you believe that peacocks' feathers are unlucky?" she asked, looking pensively at the fringe of green and azure plumage on her fan.

"I am not altogether free from superstition, but my idea of the fates has never taken that particular form. Why should the peacock be a bird of evil omen? I can believe anything bad of the screech-owl or the raven – but the harmless ornamental peacock – surely he is innocent of our woes."

"I have known the most direful calamities follow the introduction of peacocks' feathers into a drawing-room – yet they are so tempting, one can hardly live without them."

"Really! Do you know that I have found existence endurable without so much as a tuft of down from that unmelodious bird?"

"Have you never longed for its plumage to give life and colour to your rooms? – such exquisite colour – such delicious harmony – I wonder that you, who have such artistic taste, can resist the fascination."

"I hope you have not found that pretty fan the cause of many woes?" said Mr. Hamleigh, smilingly, as the damsel posed herself in the early Italian manner, and slowly waved the bright-hued plumage.

"I cannot say that I have been altogether happy since I possessed it," answered Dopsy, with a shy downward glance, and a smothered sigh; "and yet I don't know – I have been only too happy sometimes, perhaps, and at other times deeply wretched."

"Is not that kind of variableness common to our poor human nature – independent of peacocks' feathers?"

"Not to me. I used to be the most thoughtless happy-go-lucky creature."

"Until when?"

"Till I came to Cornwall," with a faint sigh, and a sudden upward glance of a pair of blue eyes which would have been pretty, had they been only innocent of all scheming.