WE HAVE DONE WITH TEARS AND TREASONS.
"I wonder if there is any ancient crime in the Tregonell family that makes the twenty-fifth of October a fatal date," Mopsy speculated, with a lachrymose air, on the afternoon which followed the Baron's hasty departure. "This very day last year Mr. Hamleigh shot himself, and spoiled all our pleasure; and to-day, the Baron de Cazalet rushes away as if the house was infected, Mrs. Tregonell keeps her own room with a nervous headache, and Mr. Tregonell is going to carry off Jack to be broiled alive in some sandy waste among prowling tigers, or to catch his death of cold upon more of those horrid mountains. One might just as well have no brother."
"If he ever sent us anything from abroad we shouldn't feel his loss so keenly," said Dopsy, in a plaintive voice, "but he doesn't. If he were to traverse the whole of Africa we shouldn't be the richer by a single ostrich feather—and those undyed natural ostriches are such good style. South America teems with gold and jewels; Peru is a proverb; but what are we the better off?"
"It is rather bad form for the master of a house to start on his travels before his guests have cleared out," remarked Mopsy.
"And an uncommonly broad hint for the guests to hasten the clearing-out process," retorted Dopsy. "I thought we were good here for another month—till Christmas perhaps. Christmas at an old Cornish manor-house would have been too lovely—like one of the shilling annuals."
"A great deal nicer," said Mopsy, "for you never met with a country-house in a Christmas book that was not peopled with ghosts and all kind of ghastliness."
Luncheon was lively enough, albeit de Cazalet was gone, and Mrs. Tregonell was absent, and Mr. Tregonell painfully silent. The chorus of the passionless, the people for whom life means only dressing and sleeping and four meals a day, found plenty to talk about.
Jack Vandeleur was in high spirits. He rejoiced heartily at the turn which affairs had taken that morning, having from the first moment looked upon the projected meeting on Trebarwith sands as likely to be fatal to his friend, and full of peril for all concerned in the business.
He was too thorough a free-lance, prided himself too much on his personal courage and his recklessness of consequences, to offer strenuous opposition to any scheme of the kind; but he had not faced the situation without being fully aware of its danger, and he was very glad the thing had blown over without bloodshed or law-breaking. He was glad also on Mrs. Tregonell's account, very glad to know that this one woman in whose purity and honesty of purpose he had believed, had not proved herself a simulacrum, a mere phantasmagoric image of goodness and virtue. Still more did he exult at the idea of re-visiting the happy hunting-grounds of his youth, that ancient romantic world in which the youngest and most blameless years of his life had been spent. Pleasant to go back under such easy circumstances, with Leonard's purse to draw upon, to be the rich man's guide, philosopher, and friend, in a country which he knew thoroughly.
"Pray what is the cause of this abrupt departure of de Cazalet, and this sudden freak of our host's?" inquired Mrs. Torrington of her next neighbour, Mr. FitzJesse, who was calmly discussing a cutlet à la Maintenon, unmoved by the shrill chatter of the adjacent Dopsy. "I hope it is nothing wrong with the drains."