"I know what a humbug she is," retorted Leonard. "Daniel, go and find out if any messenger came for Miss Bridgeman—or if she left any message for your mistress."
Daniel went out, and came back again in five minutes. No one had seen any messenger—no one had seen Miss Bridgeman go out.
"That's always the case here when I want to ascertain a fact," growled Leonard: "no one sees or knows anything. There are twice too many servants for one to be decently served. Well, it doesn't matter much. Miss Bridgeman is old enough to take care of herself—and if she walks off a cliff—it will be her loss and nobody else's."
"I don't think you ought to speak like that of a person whom your mother loved—and who is my most intimate friend," said Christabel, with grave reproach.
Leonard had drunk a good deal at dinner; and indeed there had been an inclination on the part of all three men to drown their gloomy ideas in wine, while even Mopsy, who generally took her fair share of champagne, allowed the butler to fill her glass rather oftener than usual—sighing as she sipped the sparkling bright-coloured wine, and remembering, even in the midst of her regret for the newly dead, that she would very soon have returned to a domicile where Moët was not the daily beverage, nay, where, at times, the very beer-barrel ran dry.
After dinner Christabel went to the nursery. It flashed upon her with acutest pain as she entered the room, that when last she had been there she had not known of Angus Hamleigh's death. He had been lying yonder by the waterfall, dead, and she had not known. And now the fact of his death was an old thing—part of the history of her life.
The time when he was alive and with her, full of bright thoughts and poetic fancies, seemed ever so long ago. Yet it was only yesterday—yesterday, and gone from her life as utterly as if it were an episode in the records of dead and gone ages—as old as the story of Tristan and Iseult. She sat with her boy till he fell asleep, and sat beside him as he slept, in the dim light of the night-lamp, thinking of him who lay dead in the lonely farmhouse among those green hills they two had loved so well—hushed by the voice of the distant sea, sounding far inland in the silence of night.
She remembered how he had talked last night of the undiscovered country, and how, as he talked, with flushed cheeks, and too brilliant eyes, she had seen the stamp of death on his face. They had talked of "The Gates Ajar," a book which they had read together in the days gone by, and which Christabel had often returned to since that time—a book in which the secrets of the future are touched lightly by a daring but a delicate hand—a book which accepts every promise of the Gospel in its most literal sense, and overflows with an exultant belief in just such a Heaven as poor humanity wants. In this author's creed transition from death to life is instant—death is the Lucina of life. There is no long lethargy of the grave, there is no time of darkness. Straight from the bed of death the spirit rushes to the arms of the beloved ones who have gone before. Death, so glorified, becomes only the reunion of love.
He had talked of Socrates, and the faithful few who waited at the prison doors in the early morning, when the sacred ship had returned, and the end was near; and of that farewell discourse in the upper chamber of the house at Jerusalem which seems dimly foreshadowed by the philosopher's converse with his disciples—at Athens, the struggle towards light—at Jerusalem the light itself in fullest glory.
Christabel felt herself bound by no social duty to return to the drawing-room, more especially as Miss Vandeleur had gone upstairs to sit with the afflicted Dopsy—who was bewailing the dead very sincerely in her own fashion, with little bursts of hysterical tears and fragmentary remarks.