Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3

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Braddon Mary Elizabeth. Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3

CHAPTER I "LET ME AND MY PASSIONATE LOVE GO BY."

CHAPTER II "ALAS FOR ME THEN, MY GOOD DAYS ARE DONE."

CHAPTER III "GRIEF A FIXED STAR, AND JOY A VANE THAT VEERS."

CHAPTER IV "LOVE WILL HAVE HIS DAY."

CHAPTER V "BUT HERE IS ONE WHO LOVES YOU AS OF OLD."

CHAPTER VI "THAT LIP AND VOICE ARE MUTE FOR EVER."

CHAPTER VII "NOT THE GODS CAN SHAKE THE PAST."

CHAPTER VIII "I HAVE PUT MY DAYS AND MY DREAMS OUT OF MIND."

CHAPTER IX "AND PALE FROM THE PAST WE DRAW NIGH THEE."

CHAPTER X "BUT IT SUFFICETH, THAT THE DAY WILL END."

CHAPTER XI "WHO KNOWS NOT CIRCE?"

CHAPTER XII "AND TIME IS SETTING WI' ME, O."

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Angus Hamleigh's letter came upon Christabel like a torrent of cold water, as if that bright silvery arc which pierces the rock at St. Nectan's Kieve had struck upon her heart with its icy stream, and chilled it into stone. All through that long summer day upon which her letter must arrive at Hillside, she had lived in nervous expectation of a telegram expressing indignation, remonstrance, pleading, anger – a savage denial of her right to renounce her lover – to break her engagement. She had made up her mind in all good faith. She meant to go on to the bitter end, in the teeth of her lover's opposition, to complete her renunciation in favour of that frail creature who had so solemn a claim upon Angus Hamleigh's honour. She meant to fight this good fight – but she expected that the struggle would be hard. Oh, how long and dismal those summer hours seemed, which she spent in her own room, trying to read, trying to comfort herself with saddest strains of classic melody, and always and through all listening for the telegraph boy's knock at the hall door, or for the sudden stopping of a hansom against the kerb, bringing home her lover to remonstrate in person, in defiance of all calculations of time and space.

There was no telegram. She had to wait nearly twenty-four hours for the slow transit of the mails from the high latitude of Inverness. And when she read Angus Hamleigh's letter – those few placid words which so quietly left her free to take her own way – her heart sank with a dull despair that was infinitely worse than the keen agonies of the last few days. The finality of that brief letter – the willingness to surrender her – the cold indifference, as it seemed, to her future fate – was the hardest blow of all. Too surely it confirmed all those humiliating doubts which had tortured her since her discovery of that wretched past. He had never really cared for her. It was she who had forced him into an avowal of affection by her unconscious revelation of love – she who, unmaidenly in her ignorance of life and mankind, had been the wooer rather than the wooed.

.....

She was a good woman, no doubt, and acted honestly according to her lights; yet he was angry with her, believing that she had spoiled two lives by her incapacity to take a wide and liberal view of the human comedy.

"She is not good enough to be any honest man's wife."

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