Christabel answered no word. She sat with her hand before her eyes—tears streaming slowly down her cheeks—tears that were happily invisible in the faint light of the shaded lamps and the fading fire.
And then they went on to talk of life in the abstract—its difficulties—its problems—its consolations—and of death—and the dim world beyond—the unknown land of universal recompense, where the deep joys striven after here, and never attained, are to be ours in a purer and more spiritual form—where love shall no longer walk hand in hand with pain and sorrow, dogged by the dark spectre Death.
Illness and solitude had done much to exalt and spiritualize Angus Hamleigh's mind. The religion of dogma, the strict hard-and-fast creed which was the breath of life to Leonard's mother, had never been grappled with or accepted by him—but it was in his nature to be religious. Never at his worst had he sheltered his errors under the brazen front of paganism—never had he denied the beauty of a pure and perfect life, a simple childlike faith, heroic self-abnegating love of God and man. He had admired and honoured such virtue in others, and had been sorry that Nature had cast him in a lower mould. Then had come the sentence which told him that his days here were to be of the fewest, and, without conscious effort, his thoughts had taken a more serious cast. The great problem had come nearer home to him—and he had found its only solution to be hope—hope more or less vague and dim—more or less secure and steadfast—according to the temperament of the thinker. All metaphysical argument for or against—all theological teaching could push the thing no further. It seemed to him that it was the universal instinct of mankind to desire and hope for an imperishable life, purer, better, fairer than the life we know here—and that innate in every human breast there dwells capacity for immortality, and disbelief in extinction—and to this universal instinct he surrendered himself unreservedly, content to demand no stronger argument than that grand chapter of Corinthians which has consoled so many generations of mourners.
So now, speaking with these two women of the life to come—the fair, sweet, all-satisfying life after death—he breathed no word which the most orthodox churchman might not have approved. He spoke in the fulness of a faith which, based on instinct, and not on dogma, had ripened with the decline of all delight and interest in this lower life. He spoke as a man for whom earth's last moorings had been loosened, whose only hopes pointed skyward.
It was while he was talking thus, with an almost passionate earnestness, and yet wholly free from all earthly passion, that Mr. Tregonell entered the room and stood by the door, contemplating the group by the hearth. The spectacle was not pleasant to a man of intensely jealous temperament, a man who had been testing and proving the wife whom he could not completely trust, whom he loved grudgingly, with a savage half-angry love.
Christabel's face, dimly lighted by the lamp on the low table near her, was turned towards the speaker, the lips parted, the large blue eyes bright with emotion. Her hands were clasped upon the elbow of the chair, and her attitude was of one who listens to words of deepest, dearest meaning; while Angus Hamleigh sat a little way off with his eyes upon her face, his whole air and expression charged with feeling. To Leonard's mind all such earnestness, all sentiment of any kind, came under one category: it all meant love-making, more or less audacious, more or less hypocritical, dressed in modern phraseology, sophisticated, disguised, super-refined, fantastical, called one day æstheticism and peacock's feathers, another day positivism, agnosticism, Swinburne-cum-Burne-Jones-ism, but always the same thing au fond, and meaning war to domestic peace. There sat Jessie Bridgeman, the dragon of prudery placed within call, but was any woman safer for the presence of a duenna? was it not in the nature of such people to look on simperingly while the poison cup was being quaffed, and to declare afterwards that they had supposed the mixture perfectly harmless? No doubt, Tristan and Iseult had somebody standing by to play propriety when they drank from the fatal goblet, and bound themselves for life in the meshes of an unhappy love. No, the mere fact of Miss Bridgeman's presence was no pledge of safety.
There was no guilt in Mrs. Tregonell's countenance, assuredly, when she looked up and saw her husband standing near the door, watchful, silent, with a pre-occupied air that was strange to him.
"What is the matter, Leonard?" she asked, for his manner implied that something was amiss.
"Nothing—I—I was wondering to find you up so late—that's all."
"The Rector and his wife stayed till eleven, and we have been sitting here talking. Mr. Hamleigh means to leave us to-morrow."