There was a sad silent week of waiting before the bride set forth upon her bridal tour, robed in deepest mourning. For six days the windows of Mount Royal were darkened, and Leonard and his newly wedded wife kept within the shadow of that house of death, almost as strictly as if they had been Jewish mourners, bound by ancient ceremonial laws, whereof the close observance is a kind of patriotism among a people who have no fatherland. All the hot-houses at Mount Royal gave out their treasures—white hyacinths, and rose-flushed cyclamen, gardenia, waxen camellias, faint Dijon roses—for the adornment of the death chamber. The corridor outside that darkened room had an odour of hot-house flowers. The house, folded in silence and darkness, felt like some splendid sepulchre. Leonard was deeply depressed by his mother's death; more shocked by its suddenness, by this discordant note in his triumphant marriage song, than by the actual fact; this loss having been long discounted in his own mind among the evils of the future.
Christabel's grief was terrible, albeit she had lived for the last year in constant fear of this affliction. Its bitterness was in no wise lessened because it had been long expected. Never even in her saddest moments had she realized the agony of that parting, the cold dull sense of loneliness, of dismal abandonment, in a loveless, joyless, world, when that one beloved friend was taken from her. Leonard tried his best to console her, putting aside his own sorrow, in the endeavour to comfort his bride; but his efforts at consolation were not happy, for the most part taking the form of philosophical truisms which may be very good in an almanack, or as padding for a country newspaper, but which sound dull and meaningless to the ear of the mourner who says in his heart there was never any sorrow like unto my sorrow.
In the low sunlight of the March afternoon they laid Mrs. Tregonell's coffin in the family vault, beside the niche where her faithful husband of ten years' wedded life took his last long rest. There, in the darkness, the perfume of many flowers mixing with the cold earthy odours of the tomb, they left her who had so long been the despotic mistress of Mount Royal; and then they drove back to the empty house, where the afternoon light that streamed in through newly opened windows had a garish look, as if it had no right to be there.
The widow's will was of the simplest. She left legacies to the old servants; her wardrobe, with the exception of laces and furs, to Dormer; mementoes to a few old friends; two thousand pounds in trust for certain small local charities; to Christabel all her jewels and books; and to her son everything else of which she died possessed. He was now by inheritance from his mother, and in right of his wife, master of the Champernowne estate, which, united to the Tregonell property, made him one of the largest landowners in the West of England. Christabel's fortune had been strictly settled on herself before her marriage, with reversion to Leonard in the failure of children; but the fact of this settlement, to which he had readily agreed, did not lessen Leonard's sense of importance as representative of the Tregonells and Champernownes.
Christabel and her husband started for the Continent on the day after the funeral, Leonard fervently hoping that change of scene and constant movement would help his wife to forget her grief. It was a dreary departure for a honeymoon tour—the sombre dress of bride and bridegroom, the doleful visage of Dormer, the late Mrs. Tregonell's faithful maid, whom the present Mrs. Tregonell retained for her own service, glad to have a person about her who had so dearly loved the dead. They travelled to Weymouth, crossed to Cherbourg, and thence to Paris, and on without stopping to Bordeaux; then, following the line southward, they visited all the most interesting towns of southern France—Albi, Montauban, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Montpellier, Nismes, and so to the fairy-like shores of the Mediterranean, lingering on their way to look at mediæval cathedrals, Roman baths and amphitheatres, citadels, prisons, palaces, aqueducts, all somewhat dry-as-dust and tiresome to Leonard, but full of interest to Christabel, who forgot her own griefs as she pored over these relics of pagan and Christian history.
Nice was in all its glory of late spring when, after a lingering progress, they arrived at that Brighton of the south. It was nearly six weeks since that March sunset which had lighted the funeral procession in Minster Churchyard, and Christabel was beginning to grow accustomed to the idea of her aunt's death—nay, had begun to look back with a dim sense of wonder at the happy time in which they two had been together, their love unclouded by any fear of doom and parting. That last year of Mrs. Tregonell's life had been Christabel's apprenticeship to grief. All the gladness and thoughtlessness of youth had been blighted by the knowledge of an inevitable parting—a farewell that must soon be spoken—a dear hand clasped fondly to-day, but which must be let go to-morrow.
Under that soft southern sky a faint bloom came back to Christabel's cheeks, which had not until now lost the wan whiteness they had worn on her wedding-day. She grew more cheerful, talked brightly and pleasantly to her husband, and put off the aspect of gloom with the heavy crape-shrouded gown which marked the first period of her mourning. She came down to dinner one evening in a gown of rich lustreless black silk, with a cluster of Cape jasmine among the folds of her white crape fichu, whereat Leonard rejoiced exceedingly, his being one of those philosophic minds which believe that the too brief days of the living should never be frittered away upon lamentations for the dead.
"You're looking uncommonly jolly, Belle," said Leonard, as his wife took her seat at the little table in front of an open window overlooking the blue water and the amphitheatre of hills, glorified by the sunset. They were dining at a private table in the public room of the hotel, Leonard having a fancy for the life and bustle of the table d'hôte rather than the seclusion of his own apartments. Christabel hated sitting down with a herd of strangers; so, by way of compromise, they dined at their own particular table, and looked on at the public banquet, as at a stage-play enacted for their amusement.
There were others who preferred the exclusiveness of a separate table: among these two middle-aged men—one military, both new arrivals—who sat within earshot of Mr. and Mrs. Tregonell.
"That's a fascinating get-up, Belle," pursued Leonard, proud of his wife's beauty, and not displeased at a few respectful glances from the men at the neighbouring table which that beauty had elicited. "By-the-by, why shouldn't we go to the opera to-night? They do 'Traviata;' none of your Wagner stuff, but one of the few operas a fellow can understand. It will cheer you up a bit."