The fatal three, vol. I

By M. E. Braddon

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Title: The fatal three, vol. I

Author: M. E. Braddon

Release date: February 19, 2025 [eBook #75410]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Simpkin, Marshall, 1888

Credits: Bob Taylor, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FATAL THREE, VOL. I ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




  THE FATAL THREE

  A Novel

  BY THE AUTHOR OF

  “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
  “ISHMAEL,” “MOHAWKS,”
  ETC.

  IN THREE VOLUMES
  VOL. I.

  LONDON
  SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
  STATIONERS’ HALL COURT

  [_All rights reserved_]


  LONDON:
  ROBSON AND SONS LIMITED, PRINTERS PANCRAS ROAD N.W.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

Book the First.


CLOTHO; OR SPINNING THE THREAD.

  CHAP.                                                             PAGE

     I. “WE HAVE BEEN SO HAPPY”                                        3

    II. FAY                                                           13

   III. A SUPERIOR PERSON                                             27

    IV. ALL SHE COULD REMEMBER                                        41

     V. WITHOUT THE WOLF                                              79

    VI. “AH! PITY! THE LILY IS WITHERED”                             112

   VII. DRIFTING APART                                               129

  VIII. “SUCH THINGS WERE”                                           146

    IX. THE FACE IN THE CHURCH                                       160

     X. THERE IS ALWAYS THE SKELETON                                 179

    XI. THE BEGINNING OF DOUBT                                       210

   XII. “SHE CANNOT BE UNWORTHY”                                     231

  XIII. SHALL SHE BE LESS THAN ANOTHER?                              244

   XIV. LIFTING THE CURTAIN                                          274




  BOOK THE FIRST.

  CLOTHO; OR SPINNING THE THREAD.




CHAPTER I.

“WE HAVE BEEN SO HAPPY.”


“I’m afraid she will be a terrible bore,” said the lady, with a slight
pettishness in the tone of a voice that was naturally sweet.

“How can she bore us, love? She is only a child, and you can do what
you like with her,” said the gentleman.

“My dear John, you have just admitted that she is between thirteen and
fourteen—a great deal more than a child—a great overgrown girl, who
will want to be taken about in the carriage, and to come down to the
drawing-room, and who will be always in the way. Had she been a child
of Mildred’s age, and a playfellow for Mildred, I should not have
objected half so much.”

“I’m very sorry you object; but I have no doubt she will be a
playfellow for Mildred all the same, and that she will not mind
spending a good deal of her life in the schoolroom.”

“Evidently, John, you don’t know what girls of fourteen are. I do.”

“Naturally, Maud, since it is not so many years since you yourself were
that age.”

The lady smiled, touched ever so slightly by the suggestion of youth,
which was gratifying to the mother of a seven-year-old daughter.

The scene was a large old-fashioned drawing-room, in an old-fashioned
street in the very best quarter of the town, bounded on the west by
Park Lane and on the east by Grosvenor Square. The lady was sitting
at her own particular table, in her favourite window, in the summer
gloaming; the gentleman was standing with his back to the velvet-draped
mantelpiece. The room was full of flowers and prettinesses of every
kind, and offered unmistakable evidence of artistic taste and large
means in its possessors.

The lady was young and fair, a tall slip of a woman, who afforded a
Court milliner the very best possible scaffolding for expensive gowns.
The gentleman was middle-aged and stout, with strongly-marked features
and a resolute, straightforward expression. The lady was the daughter
of an Irish peer; the gentleman was a commoner, whose fortune had been
made in a great wholesale firm, which had still its mammoth warehouses
near St. Paul’s Churchyard, and its manufactory at Lyons, but with
which John Fausset had no longer any connection. He had taken his
capital out of the business, and had cleansed himself from the stain
of commercial dealings before he married the Honourable Maud Donfrey,
third daughter of Lord Castle-Connell.

Miss Donfrey had given herself very willingly to the commoner,
albeit he was her senior by more than twenty years, and, in her own
deprecating description of him, was quite out of her set. She liked
him not a little for his own sake, and for the power his strong will
exercised over her own weaker nature; but she liked him still better
for the sake of wealth which seemed unlimited.

She was nineteen at the time of her marriage, and she had been married
nine years. Those years had brought the Honourable Mrs. Fausset only
one child, the seven-year-old daughter playing about the room in the
twilight; and maternity had offered very little hindrance to the lady’s
pleasures as a woman of fashion. She had been indulged to the uttermost
by a fond and admiring husband; and now for the first time in his life
John Fausset had occasion to ask his wife a favour, which was not
granted too readily. It must be owned that the favour was not a small
one, involving nothing less than the adoption of an orphan girl in
whose fate Mr. Fausset was interested.

“It is very dreadful,” sighed Mrs. Fausset, as if she were speaking
of an earthquake. “We have been so happy alone together—you and I and
Mildred.”

“Yes, dearest, when we have been alone, which, you will admit, has not
been very often.”

“O, but visitors do not count. They come and go. They don’t belong to
us. This dreadful girl will be one of us; or she will expect to be. I
feel as if the golden circle of home-life were going to be broken.”

“Not broken, Maud, only expanded.”

“O, but you can’t expand it by letting in a stranger. Had the mother
no people of her own; no surroundings whatever; nobody but you who
could be appealed to for this wretched girl?” inquired Mrs. Fausset,
fanning herself wearily, as she lolled back in her low chair.

She wore a loose cream-coloured gown, of softest silk and Indian
embroidery, and there were diamond stars trembling amongst her feathery
golden hair. The flowing garment in which she had dined alone with her
husband was to be changed presently for white satin and old Mechlin
lace, in which she was to appear at three evening parties; but in the
meantime, having for once in a way dined at home, she considered her
mode of life intensely domestic.

The seven-year-old daughter was roaming about with her doll, sometimes
in one drawing-room, sometimes in another. There were three, opening
into each other, the innermost room half conservatory, shadowy with
palms and tropical ferns. Mildred was enjoying herself in the quiet
way of children accustomed to play alone, looking at the pretty things
upon the various tables, peering in at the old china figures in the
cabinets—the ridiculous Chelsea shepherd and shepherdess; the Chelsea
lady in hawking costume, with a falcon upon her wrist; the absurd
lambs, and more absurd foliage; and the Bow and Battersea ladies and
gentlemen, with their blunt features and coarse complexions. Mildred
was quite happy, prowling about and looking at things in silent wonder;
turning over the leaves of illustrated books, and lifting the lids of
gold and enamelled boxes; trying to find out the uses and meanings of
things. Sometimes she came back to the front drawing-room, and seated
herself on a stool at her mother’s feet, solemnly listening to the
conversation, following it much more earnestly, and comprehending it
much better, than either her father or mother would have supposed
possible.

To stop up after nine o’clock was an unwonted joy for Mildred, who went
to bed ordinarily at seven. The privilege had been granted in honour of
the rare occasion—a _tête-à-tête_ dinner in the height of the London
season.

“Is there no one else who could take her?” repeated Mrs. Fausset
impatiently, finding her husband slow to answer.

“There is really no one else upon whom the poor child has any claim.”

“Cannot she remain at school? You could pay for her schooling, of
course. I should not mind that.”

This was generous in a lady who had brought her husband a nominal five
thousand pounds, and who spent his money as freely as if it had been
water.

“She cannot remain at school. She is a kind of girl who cannot get on
at school. She needs home influences.”

“You mean that she is a horrid rebellious girl who has been expelled
from a school, and whom I am to take because nobody else will have her.”

“You are unjust and ungenerous, Maud. The girl has not been expelled.
She is a girl of peculiar temper, and very strong feelings, and she
is unhappy amidst the icy formalities of an unexceptionable school.
Perhaps had she been sent to some struggling schoolmistress in a small
way of business she might have been happier. At any rate, she is not
happy, and as her people were friends of mine in the past I should
like to make her girlhood happy, and to see her well married, if I can.”

“But are there not plenty of other people in the world who would do all
you want if you paid them. I’m sure I should not grudge the money.”

“It is not a question of money. The girl has money of her own. She is
an heiress.”

“Then she is a ward in Chancery, I suppose?”

“No, she is my ward. I am her sole trustee.”

“And you really want to have her here in our own house, and at The
Hook, too, I suppose. Always with us wherever we go.”

“That is what I want—until she marries. She will be twenty in five
years, and in all probability she will marry before she is twenty. It
is not a life-long sacrifice that I am asking from you, Maud; and,
remember, it is the first favour I have ever asked you.”

“Let the little girl come, mother,” pleaded Mildred, clambering on to
her mother’s knee.

She had been sitting with her head bent over her doll, and her hair
falling forward over her face like golden rain, for the last ten
minutes. Mrs. Fausset had no suspicion that the child had been
listening, and this sudden appeal was startling to the last degree.

“Wisdom has spoken from my darling’s rosy lips,” said Fausset, coming
over to the window and stooping to kiss his child.

“My dear John, you must know that your wish is a law to me,” replied
his wife, submitting all at once to the inevitable. “If you are really
bent upon having your ward here she must come.”

“I am really bent upon it.”

“Then let her come as soon as you like.”

“I will bring her to-morrow.”

“And I shall have some one to play with,” said Mildred, in her baby
voice; “I shall give her my second best doll.”

“Not your best, Mildred?” asked the father, smiling at her.

Mildred reflected for a few moments.

“I’ll wait and see what she is like,” she said, “and if she is very
nice I will give her quite my best doll. The one you brought me from
Paris, father. The one that walks and talks.”

Maud Fausset sighed, and looked at the little watch dangling on her
chatelaine.

“A quarter to ten! How awfully late for Mildred to be up! And it is
time I dressed. I hope you are coming with me, John. Ring the bell,
please. Come, Mildred.”

The child kissed her father with a hearty, clinging kiss which meant a
world of love, and then she picked up her doll—not the walking-talking
machine from Paris, but a friendly, old-fashioned wax and bran
personage—and trotted out of the room, hanging on to her mother’s gown.

“How sweet she is!” muttered the father, looking after her fondly; “and
what a happy home it has been! I hope the coming of that other one
won’t make any difference.”




CHAPTER II.

FAY.


Mrs. Fausset’s three parties, the last of which was a very smart ball,
kept her away from home until the summer sun was rising above Grosvenor
Square, and the cocks were crowing in the mews behind Upper Parchment
Street. Having been so late in the morning, Mrs. Fausset ignored
breakfast, and only made her appearance in time for lunch, when her
husband came in from his ride. He had escorted her to the first of her
parties, and had left her on the way to the second, to go and finish
his evening in the House, which he found much more interesting than
society.

They met at luncheon, and talked of their previous night’s experiences,
and of indifferent matters. Not a word about the expected presence
which was so soon to disturb their domestic calm. Mr. Fausset affected
cheerfulness, yet was evidently out of spirits. He looked round
the picturesque old oak dining-room wistfully; he strolled into the
inner room, with its dwarf bookcases, pictures, and bronzes, its cosy
corner behind a sixfold Indian screen, a century-old screen, bought
at Christie’s out of a famous collection. He surveyed this temple of
domestic peace, and wondered within himself whether it would be quite
as peaceful when a new presence was among them.

“Surely a girl of fourteen can make no difference,” he argued, “even if
she has a peculiar temper. If she is inclined to be troublesome, she
shall be made to keep herself to herself. Maud shall not be rendered
unhappy by her.”

He went out soon after lunch, and came home again at afternoon tea-time
in a hansom, with a girl in a black frock. A four-wheeler followed,
with a large trunk and two smaller boxes. The splendid creatures in
knee-breeches and powder who opened the door had been ordered to deny
their mistress to everybody, so Mrs. Fausset was taking tea alone in
her morning-room.

The morning-room occupied the whole front of the second floor, a
beautiful room with three windows, the centre a large bow jutting out
over empty space. This bow-window had been added when Mr. Fausset
married, on a suggestion from his _fiancée_. It spoiled the external
appearance of the house, but it made the room delightful. For furniture
and decoration there was everything pretty, novel, eccentric, and
expensive that Maud Fausset had ever been able to think of. She had
only stopped her caprices and her purchases when the room would not
hold another thing of beauty. There was a confusion of form and colour,
but the general effect was charming; and Mrs. Fausset, in a loose white
muslin gown, suited the room, just as the room suited Mrs. Fausset.

She was sitting in the bow-window, in a semicircle of flowers and
amidst the noises of the West End world, waiting for her husband and
the new-comer, nervous and apprehensive. The scarlet Japanese tea-table
stood untouched, the water bubbling in the quaint little bronze
tea-kettle, swinging between a pair of rampant dragons.

She started as the door opened, but kept her seat. She did not want to
spoil the new-comer by an undue appearance of interest.

John Fausset came into the room, leading a pale girl dressed in black.
She was tall for her age, and very thin, and her small face had a
pinched look, which made the great black eyes look larger. She was
a peculiar-looking girl, with an olive tint in her complexion which
hinted at a lineage not altogether English. She was badly dressed in
the best materials, and had a look of never having been much cared for
since she was born.

“This is Fay,” said Mr. Fausset, trying to be cheerful.

His wife held out her hand, which the girl took coldly, but not shyly.
She had an air of being perfectly self-possessed.

“Her name is Fay, is it? What a pretty name! By the bye, you did not
tell me her surname.”

“Did I not? Her name is Fausset. She is a distant relation of my
family.”

“I did not understand that last night,” said Mrs. Fausset, with a
puzzled air. “You only talked of a friend.”

“Was that so? I should have said a family connection. Yes, Fay and I
are namesakes, and kindred.”

He patted the girl’s shoulder caressingly, and made her sit down by the
little red table in front of the tea-cups, and cakes, and buns. The
buns reminded him of his daughter.

“Where is Mildred?”

“She is at her music-lesson; but she will be here in a minute or two,
no doubt,” answered his wife.

“Poor little mite, to have to begin lessons so soon; the chubby
little fingers stuck down upon the cold hard keys. The piano is so
uninviting at seven years old; such a world of labour for such a small
effect. If she could turn a barrel-organ, with a monkey on the top,
I’m sure she would like music ever so much better; and after a year
or two of grinding it would dawn upon her that there was something
wanting in that kind of music, and then she would attack the piano
of her own accord, and its difficulties would not seem so hopelessly
uninteresting. Are you fond of lessons, Fay?”

“I hate them,” answered the girl, with vindictive emphasis.

“And I suppose you hate books too?” said Mrs. Fausset, rather
scornfully.

“No, I love books.”

She looked about the spacious room, curiously, with admiring eyes.
People who came from very pretty rooms of their own were lost in
admiration at Mrs. Fausset’s morning-room, with its heterogeneous
styles of art—here Louis Seize, there Japanese; Italian on one side,
Indian on the other. What a dazzling effect, then, it must needs have
upon this girl, who had spent the last five years of her life amidst
the barren surroundings of a suburban school!

“What a pretty room!” she exclaimed at last.

“Don’t you think my wife was made to live in pretty rooms?” asked
Fausset, touching Maud’s delicate hand as it moved among the tea-things.

“She is very pretty herself,” said Fay, bluntly.

“Yes, and all things about her should be pretty. This thing, for
instance,” as Mildred came bounding into the room, and clambered on her
father’s knee. “This is my daughter, Fay, and your playfellow, if you
know how to play.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, for they always snubbed us for anything like
play,” answered the stranger, “but Mildred shall teach me, if she will.”

She had learnt the child’s name from Mr. Fausset during the drive from
Streatham Common to Upper Parchment Street.

Mildred stretched out her little hand to the girl in black with
somewhat of a patronising air. She had lived all her little life among
bright colours and beautiful objects, in a kind of butterfly world; and
she concluded that this pale girl in sombre raiment must needs be poor
and unhappy. She looked her prettiest, smiling down at the stranger
from her father’s shoulder, where she hung fondly. She looked like a
cherub in a picture by Rubens, red-lipped, with eyes of azure, and
flaxen hair just touched with gold, and a complexion of dazzling lily
and carnation-colour suffused with light.

“I mean to give you my very best doll,” she said.

“You darling, how I shall adore you!” cried the strange girl
impulsively, rising from her seat at the tea-table, and clasping
Mildred in her arms.

“That is as it should be,” said Fausset, patting Fay’s shoulder
affectionately. “Let there be a bond of love between you two.”

“And will you play with me, and learn your lessons with me, and sleep
in my room?” asked Mildred coaxingly.

“No, darling. Fay will have a room of her own,” said Mrs. Fausset,
replying to the last inquiry. “It is much nicer for girls to have rooms
to themselves.”

“No, it isn’t,” answered Mildred, with a touch of petulance that was
pretty in so lovely a child. “I want Fay to sleep with me. I want her
to tell me stories every night.”

“You have mother to tell you stories, Mildred,” said Mrs. Fausset,
already inclined to be jealous.

“Not very often. Mother goes to parties almost every night.”

“Not at The Hook, love.”

“O, but at The Hook there’s always company. Why can’t I have Fay to
tell me stories every night?” urged the child persistently.

“I don’t see why they should not be together, Maud,” said Mr. Fausset,
always prone to indulge Mildred’s lightest whim.

“It is better that Fay should have a room of her own, for a great many
reasons,” replied his wife, with a look of displeasure.

“Very well, Maud, so be it,” he answered, evidently desiring to
conciliate her. “And which room is Fay to have?”

“I have given her Bell’s room.”

Mr. Fausset’s countenance fell.

“Bell’s room—a servant’s room!”—he repeated blankly.

“It is very inconvenient for Bell, of course,” said Mrs. Fausset. “She
will have to put up with an extra bed in the housemaid’s room; and as
she has always been used to a room of her own, she made herself rather
disagreeable about the change.”

Mr. Fausset was silent, and seemed thoughtful. Mildred had pulled Fay
away from the table and led her to a distant window, where a pair of
Virginian love-birds were twittering in their gilded cage, half hidden
amidst the bank of feathery white spirea and yellow marguerites which
filled the recess.

“I should like to see the room,” said Fausset presently, when his wife
had put down her teacup.

“My dear John, why should you trouble yourself about such a detail?”

“I want to do my duty to the girl—if I can.”

“I think you might trust such a small matter to _me_, or even to my
housekeeper,” Maud Fausset answered with an offended air. “However,
you are quite at liberty to make a personal inspection. Bell is very
particular, and any room she occupied is sure to be nice. But you can
judge for yourself. The room is on the same floor as Mildred’s.”

This last remark implied that to occupy any apartment on that floor
must be a privilege.

“But not with the same aspect.”

“Isn’t it? No, I suppose not. The windows look the other way,” said
Mrs. Fausset innocently.

She was not an over-educated person. She adored Keats, Shelley, and
Browning, and talked about them learnedly in a way; but she hardly
knew the points of the compass.

She sauntered out of the room, a picture of languid elegance in her
flowing muslin gown. There were flowers on the landing, and a scarlet
Japanese screen to fence off the stairs that went downward, and a
blue-and-gold Algerian curtain to hide the upward flight. This second
floor was Mrs. Fausset’s particular domain. Her bedroom and bathroom
and dressing-room were all on this floor. Mr. Fausset lived there also,
but seemed to be there on sufferance.

She pulled aside the Algerian curtain, and they went up to the third
story. The two front rooms were Mildred’s bedroom and schoolroom.
The bedroom-door was open, revealing an airy room with two windows
brightened by outside flower-boxes, full of gaudy red geraniums and
snow-white marguerites, a gay-looking room, with a pale blue paper and
a blue-and-cream-colour carpet. A little brass bed, with lace curtains,
for Mildred—an iron bed, without curtains, for Mildred’s maid.

The house was like many old London houses, more spacious than it
looked outside. There were four or five small rooms at the back
occupied by servants, and it was one of those rooms—a very small room
looking into a mews—which Mr. Fausset went to inspect.

It was not a delightful room. There was an outside wall at right-angles
with the one window which shut off the glory of the westering sun.
There was a forest of chimney-pots by way of prospect. There was
not even a flower-box to redeem the dinginess of the outlook. The
furniture was neat, and the room was spotlessly clean; but as much
might be said of a cell in Portland Prison. A narrow iron bedstead,
a couple of cane chairs, a common mahogany chest of drawers in the
window, and on the chest of drawers a white toilet-cover and a small
mahogany looking-glass; a deal washstand and a zinc bath. These are not
luxurious surroundings; and Mr. Fausset’s countenance did not express
approval.

“I’m sure it is quite as nice a room as she would have at any
boarding-school,” said his wife, answering that disapproving look.

“Perhaps; but I want her to feel as if she were not at school, but at
home.”

“She can have a prettier room at The Hook, I daresay, though we are
short of bedrooms even there—if she is to go to The Hook with us.”

“Why, of course she is to go with us. She is to live with us till she
marries.”

Mrs. Fausset sighed, and looked profoundly melancholy.

“I don’t think we shall get her married very easily,” she said.

“Why not?” asked her husband quickly, looking at her anxiously as he
spoke.

“She is so remarkably plain.”

“Did she strike you so? I think her rather pretty, or at least
interesting. She has magnificent eyes.”

“So has an owl in an ivy-bush,” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset petulantly.
“Those great black eyes in that small pale face are positively
repulsive. However, I don’t want to depreciate her. She is of your kith
and kin, and you are interested in her; so we must do the best we can.
I only hope Mildred will get on with her.”

This conversation took place upon the stairs. Mr. Fausset was at the
morning-room door by this time. He opened it, and saw his daughter in
the sunlit window among the flowers, with her arm round Fay’s neck.

“They have begun very well,” he said.

“Children are so capricious,” answered his wife.




CHAPTER III.

A SUPERIOR PERSON.


Mildred and her father’s ward got on remarkably well—perhaps a little
too well to please Mrs. Fausset, who had been jealous of the new-comer,
and resentful of her intrusion from the outset. Mildred did not show
herself capricious in her treatment of her playfellow. The child had
never had a young companion before, and to her the advent of Fay
meant the beginning of a brighter life. Until Fay came there had been
no one but mother; and mother spent the greater part of her life in
visiting and receiving visits. Only the briefest intervals between a
ceaseless round of gaieties could be afforded to Mildred. Her mother
doated on her, or thought she did; but she had allowed herself to be
caught in the cogs of the great society wheel, and she was obliged to
go round with the wheel. So far as brightly-furnished rooms and an
expensive morning governess, ever so much too clever for the pupil’s
requirements, and costly toys and pretty frocks and carriage-drives,
could go, Mildred was a child in an earthly paradise; but there are
some children who yearn for something more than luxurious surroundings
and fine clothes, and Mildred Fausset was one of those. She wanted a
great deal of love—she wanted love always; not in brief snatches, as
her mother gave it—hurried caresses given in the midst of dressing for
a ball, hasty kisses before stepping into her carriage to be whisked
off to a garden-party, or in all the pomp and splendour of ostrich
feathers, diamonds, and court-train before the solemn function of
a Drawing-room. Such passing glimpses of love were not enough for
Mildred. She wanted warm affections interwoven with the fabric of her
life; she wanted loving companionship from morning till night; and this
she had from Fay. From the first moment of their clasping hands the
two girls had loved each other. Each sorely in need of love, they had
come together naturally, and with all the force of free undisciplined
nature, meeting and mingling like two rivers.

John Fausset saw their affection, and was delighted. That loving union
between the girl and the child seemed to solve all difficulties. Fay
was no longer a stranger. She was a part of the family, merged in the
golden circle of domestic love. Mrs. Fausset looked on with jaundiced
eye.

“If one could only believe it were genuine!” she sighed.

“Genuine! which of them do you suppose is pretending? Not Mildred,
surely?”

“Mildred! No, indeed. _She_ is truth itself.”

“Why do you suspect Fay of falsehood?”

“My dear John, I fear—I only say I fear—that your _protégée_ is sly.
She has a quiet self-contained air that I don’t like in one so young.”

“I don’t wonder she is self-contained. You do so little to draw her
out.”

“Her attachment to Mildred has an exaggerated air—as if she wanted to
curry favour with us by pretending to be fond of our child,” said Mrs.
Fausset, ignoring her husband’s remark.

“Why should she curry favour? She is not here as a dependent—though she
is made to wear the look of one sometimes more than I like. I have
told you that her future is provided for; and as for pretending to be
fond of Mildred, she is the last girl to pretend affection. She would
have been better liked at school if she had been capable of pretending.
There is a wild, undisciplined nature under that self-contained air you
talk about.”

“There is a very bad temper, if that is what you mean. Bell has
complained to me more than once on that subject.”

“I hope you have not set Bell in authority over her,” exclaimed Mr.
Fausset hastily.

“There must be some one to maintain order when Miss Colville is away.”

“That some one should be you or I, not Bell.”

“Bell is a conscientious person, and she would make no improper use of
authority.”

“She is a very disagreeable person. That is all I know about her,”
retorted Mr. Fausset, as he left the room.

He was dissatisfied with Fay’s position in the house, yet hardly knew
how to complain or what alteration to suggest. There were no positive
wrongs to resent. Fay shared Mildred’s studies and amusements; they
had their meals together, and took their airings together.

When Mildred went down to the morning-room or the drawing-room Fay
generally went with her—generally, not always. There were times when
Bell looked in at the schoolroom-door and beckoned Mildred. “Mamma
wants you alone,” she would whisper on the threshold; and Mildred ran
off to be petted and paraded before some privileged visitor.

There were differences which Fay felt keenly, and inwardly resented.
She was allowed to sit aloof when the drawing-room was full of fine
ladies, upon Mrs. Fausset’s afternoon; while Mildred was brought into
notice and talked about, her little graces exhibited and expatiated
upon, or her childish tastes conciliated. Fay would sit looking at one
of the art-books piled upon a side-table, or turning over photographs
and prints in a portfolio. She never talked unless spoken to, or did
anything to put herself forward.

Sometimes an officious visitor would notice her.

“What a clever-looking girl! Who is she?” asked a prosperous dowager,
whose own daughters were all planted out in life, happy wives and
mothers, and who could afford to interest herself in stray members of
the human race.

“She is a ward of my husband’s, Miss Fausset.”

“Indeed! A cousin, I suppose?”

“Hardly so near as that. A distant connection.”

Mrs. Fausset’s tone expressed a wish not to be bored by praise of the
clever-looking girl. People soon perceived that Miss Fausset was to
be taken no more notice of than a piece of furniture. She was there
for some reason known to Mr. and Mrs. Fausset, but she was not there
because she was wanted—except by Mildred. Everybody could see that
Mildred wanted her. Mildred would run to her as she sat apart, and
clamber on her knee, and hang upon her, and whisper and giggle with
her, and warm the statue into life. Mildred would carry her tea and
cakes, and make a loving fuss about her in spite of all the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bell was a power in the house in Upper Parchment Street. She was that
kind of old servant who is as bad as a mother-in-law, or even worse;
for your mother-in-law is a lady by breeding and education, and is in
somewise governed by reason, while your trustworthy old servant is apt
to be a creature of impulse, influenced only by feeling. Bell was a
woman of strong feelings, devotedly attached to Mrs. Fausset.

Twenty-seven years ago, when Maud Donfrey was an infant, Martha Bell
was the young wife of the head-gardener at Castle-Connell. The gardener
and his wife lived at one of the lodges near the bank of the Shannon,
and were altogether superior people for their class. Martha had been a
lace-maker at Limerick, and was fairly educated. Patrick Bell was less
refined, and had no ideas beyond his garden; but he was honest, sober,
and thoroughly respectable. He seldom read the newspapers, and had
never heard of Home Rule or the three F.s.

Their first child died within three weeks of its birth, and a wet-nurse
being wanted at the great house for Lady Castle-Connell’s seventh
baby, Mrs. Bell was chosen as altogether the best person for that
confidential office. She went to live at the great white house in the
beautiful gardens near the river. It was only a temporary separation,
she told Patrick; and Patrick took courage at the thought that his
wife would return to him as soon as Lady Castle-Connell’s daughter was
weaned, while in the meantime he was to enjoy the privilege of seeing
her every Sunday afternoon; but somehow it happened that Martha Bell
never went back to the commonly-furnished little rooms in the lodge, or
to the coarse-handed husband.

Martha Bell was a woman of strong feelings. She grieved passionately
for her dead baby, and she took the stranger’s child reluctantly to
her aching breast. But babies have a way of getting themselves loved,
and one baby will creep into the place of another unawares. Before
Mrs. Bell had been at the great house three months she idolised
her nursling. By the time she had been there a year she felt that
life would be unbearable without her foster-child. Fortunately for
her, she seemed as necessary to the child as the child was to her.
Maud was delicate, fragile, lovely, and evanescent of aspect. Lady
Castle-Connell had lost two out of her brood, partly, she feared, from
carelessness in the nursery. Bell was devoted to her charge, and Bell
was entreated to remain for a year or two at least.

Bell consented to remain for a year; she became accustomed to the
comforts and refinements of a nobleman’s house; she hated the lodge,
and she cared very little for her husband. It was a relief to her
when Patrick Bell sickened of his desolate home, and took it into his
head to emigrate to Canada, where he had brothers and sisters settled
already. He and his wife parted in the friendliest spirit, with some
ideas of reunion years hence, when the Honourable Maud should have
outgrown the need of a nurse; but the husband died in Canada before the
wife had made up her mind to join him there. Mrs. Bell lived at the
great white house until Maud Donfrey left Castle-Connell as the bride
of John Fausset. She went before her mistress to the house in Upper
Parchment Street, and was there when the husband and wife arrived after
their Continental honeymoon. From that hour she remained in possession
at The Hook, Surrey, or at Upper Parchment Street, or at any temporary
abode by sea or lake. Bell was always a power in Mrs. Fausset’s life,
ruling over the other servants, dictating and fault-finding in a quiet,
respectful way, discovering the weak side of everybody’s character,
and getting to the bottom of everybody’s history. The servants hated
her, and bowed down before her. Mrs. Fausset was fond of her as a part
of her own childhood, remembering that great love which had watched
through all her infantine illnesses and delighted in all her childish
joys. Yet, even despite these fond associations, there were times
when Maud Fausset thought that it would be a good thing if dear old
Bell would accept a liberal pension and go and live in some rose and
honeysuckle cottage among the summery meadows by the Thames. Mrs.
Fausset had only seen that riverside region in summer, and she had
hardly realised the stern fact of winter in that district. She never
thought of rheumatism in connection with one of those low white-walled
cottages, half-hidden under overhanging thatched gables, and curtained
with woodbine and passionflower, rose and myrtle. Dear old Bell was
forty-eight, straight as a ramrod, very thin, with sharp features, and
eager gray eyes under bushy iron-gray brows. She had thick iron-gray
hair, and she never wore a cap; that was one of her privileges, and a
mark of demarcation between her and the other servants—that and her
afternoon gown of black silk or satin.

She had no specific duties in the house, but had something to say about
everything. Mrs. Fausset’s French maid and Mildred’s German maid were
at one in their detestation of Bell; but both were eminently civil to
that authority.

From the hour of Fay’s advent in Upper Parchment Street, Bell had set
her face against her. In the first place, she had not been taken into
Mr. and Mrs. Fausset’s confidence about the girl. She had not been
consulted or appealed to in any way; and, in the second place, she
had been told that her bedroom would be wanted for the new-comer, and
that she must henceforward share a room with one of the housemaids, an
indignity which this superior person keenly felt.

Nor did Fay do anything to conciliate this domestic power. Fay
disliked Bell as heartily as Bell disliked Fay. She refused all offers
of service from the confidential servant at the outset, and when
Bell wanted to help in unpacking her boxes—perhaps with some idea of
peering into those details of a girl’s possessions which in themselves
constitute a history—Fay declined her help curtly, and shut the door in
her face.

Bell had sounded her mistress, but had obtained the scantiest
information from that source. A distant connection of Mr. Fausset’s—his
ward, an heiress. Not one detail beyond this could Bell extract from
her mistress, who had never kept a secret from her. Evidently Mrs.
Fausset knew no more.

“I must say, ma’am, that for an heiress the child has been sadly
neglected,” said Bell. “Her under-linen was all at sixes and sevens
till _I_ took it in hand; and she came to this house with her left boot
worn down at heel. Her drawers are stuffed with clothes, but many of
them are out of repair; and she is such a wilful young lady that she
will hardly let _me_ touch her things.”

Bell had a habit of emphasising personal pronouns that referred to
herself.

“You must do whatever you think proper about her clothes, whether she
likes it or not,” answered Mrs. Fausset, standing before her glass,
and giving final touches to the feathery golden hair which her maid
had arranged a few minutes before. “If she wants new things, you can
buy them for her from any of my tradespeople. Mr. Fausset says she is
to be looked after in every way. You had better not go to Bond Street
for her under-linen. Oxford Street will do; and you need not go to
Stephanie for her hats. She is such a very plain girl that it would be
absurd—cruel even—to dress her like Mildred.”

“Yes, indeed, it would, ma’am,” assented Bell; and then she pursued
musingly: “If it was a good school she was at, all I can say is that
the wardrobe-woman was a very queer person to send any pupil away with
her linen in such a neglected state. And as for her education, Miss
Colville says she is shockingly backward. Miss Mildred knows more
geography and more grammar than that great overgrown girl of fourteen.”

Mrs. Fausset sighed.

“Yes, Bell, she has evidently been neglected; but her education matters
very little. It is her disposition I am anxious about.”

“Ah, ma’am, and so am _I_,” sighed Bell.

When Bell had withdrawn, Maud Fausset sat in front of her
dressing-table in a reverie. She forgot to put on her bonnet or to ring
for her maid, though she had been told the carriage was waiting, and
although she was due at a musical recital in ten minutes. She sat there
lost in thought, while the horses jingled their bits impatiently in the
street below.

“Yes, there is a mystery,” she said to herself; “everybody sees it,
even Bell.”




CHAPTER IV.

ALL SHE COULD REMEMBER.


The London season was waning, and fewer carriages rolled westward to
the Park gates in the low sunlight of late afternoon, and fewer riders
trotted eastward towards Grosvenor Square in the brighter sunshine
before luncheon. Town was gay still; but the flood-tide of pleasure
was over. The river of London life was on the ebb, and people were
beginning to talk about grouse-moors in Scotland and sulphur-springs in
Germany.

Fay had lived in Upper Parchment Street nearly two months. It seemed
to her impatient spirit as if she had lived there half a lifetime. The
life would have been hateful to her without Mildred’s love. That made
amends for a good deal, but it could not make amends for everything;
not for Bell’s quiet insolence, for instance.

Bell had replenished the alien’s wardrobe. Everything she had bought
was of excellent quality, and expensive after its kind; but had a prize
been offered for bad taste, Bell would have taken it by her selections
of raiment on this occasion. Not once did she allow Fay to have a voice
in the matter.

“Mrs. Fausset deputed _me_ to choose the things, miss,” she said, “and
I hope _I_ know my duty.”

“I suppose I _am_ very ugly,” said Fay resignedly, as she contemplated
her small features in the glass, overshadowed by a mushroom hat of
coarse brown straw, with a big brown bow, “but in this hat I look
positively hideous.”

The hat was an excellent hat: that good coarse Dunstable, which costs
money and wears for ever, the ribbon of the best quality; but Hebe
herself would have looked plain under a hat shaped like a bell-glass.

Fay’s remark was recorded to Mrs. Fausset as the indication of a
discontented spirit.

Not being able to learn anything about Fay’s history from her mistress,
Bell had tried to obtain a little light from the girl herself, but
without avail. Questioned about her school, Fay had replied that she
hated her school, and didn’t want to talk of it. Questioned about her
mother, she answered that her mother’s name was too sacred to be spoken
about to a stranger; and on a subtle attempt to obtain information
about her father, the girl flushed crimson, started up angrily from her
chair, and told the highly respectable Bell that she was not in the
habit of chattering to servants, or being questioned by them.

After this it was war to the knife on Martha Bell’s part.

Miss Colville, the expensive morning governess, was in somewise above
prejudice, and was a person of liberal mind, allowing for the fact
that she had lived all her life in other people’s houses, looking on
at lives of fashionable frivolity in which she had no share, and had
been obliged to study Debrett’s annual volume as if it were her Bible,
lest she should commit herself in every other speech, so intricate
are the ramifications and intermarriages of the Upper Ten Thousand.
Miss Colville was not unkind to Fay Fausset, and was conscientious
in her instructions; but even she resented the mystery of the girl’s
existence, and felt that her presence blemished the respectability of
the household. By and by, when she should be seeking new employment,
and should have occasion to refer to Mrs. Fausset, and to talk of
her pupils in Upper Parchment Street, there would be a difficulty in
accounting for Fay. A ward of Mr. Fausset’s, a distant connection: the
whole thing sounded improbable. An heiress who had come to the house
with torn embroidery upon her under-linen. A mystery—yes, no doubt
a mystery. And in Miss Colville’s ultra-particular phase of life no
manner of mystery was considered respectable; except always those open
secrets in the very highest circles which society agrees to ignore.

In spite of these drawbacks, Miss Colville was fairly kind to her new
charge. Fay was backward in grammar and geography; she was a dullard
about science; but she could chatter French, she knew a little Italian,
and in music she was highly gifted. In this she resembled Mildred,
who adored music, and had taken her first lessons on the piano as a
water-fowl takes to a pond, joyously, as to her native element. Fay was
not advanced in the _technique_ of the art, but she played and sang
charmingly, for the most part by ear; and she used to play and sing to
Mildred in the summer twilight, till Bell came like a prison-warder and
insisted upon Mildred’s going to bed.

“I nursed your mamma, miss,” she would say, “and _I_ never allowed her
to spoil her complexion with late hours as Miss Fay is leading you on
to do.”

At seven Mildred cared neither for health nor complexion in the
abstract, and she loved Fay’s music and Fay’s stories. Fay would tell
her a fairy tale, with musical accompaniments, improvised to suit
the story. This was Beauty’s father groping through the dark wood.
Then came the swaying of branches, the rustling of summer leaves, the
long, long sigh of the night wind, the hoot of the owl, and the roll
of distant thunder. Here came Fatima’s brothers to the rescue, with
a triumphant march, and the trampling of fiery steeds, careering up
and down the piano in presto arpeggios, bursting open the gates of
Bluebeard’s Castle with a fortissimo volley of chords.

“_I_ never heard any one make such a noise on a piano,” said Bell,
bristling with indignation.

At eight o’clock Fay’s day and evening were done. Mildred vanished like
the setting of the sun. She would like to have had Fay to sit beside
her bed and tell her stories, and talk to her, till she dropped to
sleep; but this happiness was sternly interdicted by Bell.

“She would keep you awake half the night, Miss Mildred, over-exciting
you with her stories; and what would your pa and the doctors say to
_me_?” exclaimed Bell.

The door of the bright, pretty bedchamber closed upon Mildred, and Fay
went back to the schoolroom heavy of heart, to enjoy the privilege of
sitting up by herself till half-past nine, a privilege conceded to
superior years. In that dismal hour and a half the girl had leisure
to contemplate the solitude of her friendless life. Take Mildred from
her, and she had no one—nothing. Mr. Fausset had meant to be kind to
her, perhaps. He had talked very kindly to her in the long drive
from Streatham. He had promised her a home and the love of kindred;
but evil influences had come in his way, and he had given her—Bell.
Perhaps she was of a jealous, exacting disposition; for, fondly as she
loved Mildred, she could not help comparing Mildred’s lot with her own:
Mildred’s bright, airy room and flower-decked windows, looking over
the tree-tops in the Park, with her dingy cell opening upon a forest
of chimneys, and tainted with odours of stables and kitchen; Mildred’s
butterfly frocks of lace and muslin, with the substantial ugliness
of her own attire; Mildred’s manifold possessions—trinkets, toys,
books, games, pictures, and flowers—with her empty dressing-table and
unadorned walls.

“At your age white frocks would be ridiculous,” said Bell; yet Fay
saw other girls of her age flaunting in white muslin all that summer
through.

Sometimes the footman forgot to bring her lamp, and she would sit in
the schoolroom window, looking down into the street, and watching the
carriages roll by in endless procession, with their lamps flaming in
the pale gray night, carrying their freight to balls and parties,
hurrying from pleasure to pleasure on swift-revolving wheels. A
melancholy hour this for the longing heart of youth, even when
the schoolgirl’s future participation in all these pleasures is a
certainty, or contingent only upon life; but what was it for this girl,
who had all girlhood’s yearnings for pleasure and excitement, and who
knew not if that sparkling draught would ever touch her lips, who felt
herself an alien in this fine house, a stranger at this fashionable end
of the town? It was no new thing for her to sit alone in the twilight,
a prey to melancholy thoughts. Ever since she could remember, her life
had been solitary and loveless. The home ties and tender associations
which sweeten other lives were unknown to her. She had never known
what love meant till she felt Mildred’s warm arms clinging round her
neck, and Mildred’s soft cheek pressed against hers. Her life had
been a shifting scene peopled with strangers. Dim and misty memories
of childhood’s earliest dawn conjured up a cottage-garden on a windy
hill; the sea stretching far away in the distance, bright and blue, but
unattainable; a patch of grass on one side, a patch of potatoes on the
other; a bed of wallflowers and stocks and yellow marigolds in front of
the parlour window; a family of hens and an arrogant cock strutting in
the foreground; and, standing out sharply against the sky and the sea,
a tall column surmounted by a statue.

How she had longed to get nearer that vast expanse of water, to find
out what the sea was like! From some points in the view it seemed so
near, almost as if she could touch it with her outstretched hands; from
other points it looked so far away. She used to stand on a bank behind
the cottage and watch the white-sailed boats going out to sea, and the
steamers with their trailing smoke melting and vanishing on the horizon.

“Where do they go?” she asked in her baby French. “Where do they go?”

Those were the first words she remembered speaking, and nobody seemed
ever to have answered that eager question.

No one had cared for her in those days. She was very sure of that,
looking back upon that monotonous childhood: a long series of empty
hours in a cottage garden, and with no companions except the fowls,
and no voice except that of the cow in the meadow hard by: a cow which
sent forth meaningless bellows occasionally, and which she feared as if
it had been a lion.

There was a woman in a white cap whom she called Nounou, and who seemed
too busy to care about anybody; a woman who did all the housework, and
dug the potato-garden, and looked after the fowls, and milked the cow
and made butter, and rode to market on a donkey once or twice a week:
a woman who was always in a hurry. There was a man who came home from
work at sundown, and there were two boys in blouses and sabots, the
youngest of whom was too old to play with the nurse-child. Long summer
days in the chalky garden, long hours of listless monotony in front of
the wide bright sea, had left a sense of oppression upon Fay’s mind.
She did not know even the name of the town she had seen far below the
long ridge of chalky hill—a town of tall white houses and domes and
spires, which had seemed a vast metropolis to the eyes of infancy.
She had but to shut her eyes in her evening solitude, and she could
conjure up the picture of roofs and spires, and hill and sea, and the
tall column in its railed enclosure; yet she knew no more of town or
hill than that they were on the other side of the Channel.

She remembered lying in a narrow little bed, that rocked desperately
on a windy day, and looking out at the white sea-foam dashing against
a curious oval window, like a giant’s eye; and then she remembered her
first wondering experience of railway travelling; a train flashing
past green fields and hop-gardens and houses; and then darkness and
the jolting of a cab; and after that being carried half-asleep into
a strange house, and waking to find herself in a strange room, all
very clean and neat, with a white-curtained bed and white muslin
window-curtains, and on looking out of the window, behold, there was a
patch of common all abloom with yellow gorse.

She remembered dimly that she had travelled in the charge of a little
gray-haired man, who disappeared after the journey. She found herself
now in the care of an elderly lady, very prim and strict, but not
absolutely unkind; who wore a silk gown, and a gold watch at her
waistband, and who talked in an unknown tongue. Everything here was
prettier than in Nounou’s house, and there was a better garden, a
garden where there were more flowers and no potatoes and there was the
common in the front of the garden, all hillocks and hollows, where
she was allowed to amuse herself in charge of a ruddy-faced girl in a
lavender cotton frock.

The old lady taught her the unknown tongue, which she discovered in
time to be English, and a good deal besides—reading and writing, for
instance, and the rudiments of music, a little arithmetic, grammar,
and geography. She took kindly to music and reading, and she liked to
dabble with ink; but the other lessons were abhorrent, and she gave
the orderly old lady a good deal of trouble. There was no love between
them, only endurance on either side; and the long days on the common
were almost as desolate as the days on the chalky hill above the sea.

At last there came a change. The dressmaker sent home three new frocks,
all uncompromisingly ugly; the little old gray-haired man reappeared,
looking exactly as he had looked on board the steamer, and a fly
carried Fay and this guardian to the railway-station on the common,
and thence the train took them to a great dark city, which the man
told Fay was London; and then they went in a cab through streets that
seemed endless, till at last the streets melted into a wide high-road,
with trees on either side, and the cab drove into a garden of shining
laurels and rhododendrons, and pulled up before a classic portico. Fay
had no memory of any house so grand as this, although it was only the
conventional suburban villa of sixty or seventy years ago.

Just at first the change seemed delightful. That circular
carriage-sweep, those shining rhododendrons with great rose-coloured
trusses of bloom, the drooping gold of the laburnums, and the masses
of perfumed lilac, were beautiful in her eyes. Not so beautiful the
long, bare schoolroom and the willow-pattern cups and saucers. Not so
beautiful that all-pervading atmosphere of restraint which made school
odious to Fay from the outset.

She stayed there for years—an eternity it seemed to her, looking back
upon its hopeless monotony. Pleasure, variety, excitement, she had
none. Life was an everlasting treadmill—up and down, down and up, over
and over again. The same dull round of lessons; a dismal uniformity
of food; Sunday penance in the shape of two long services in a badly
ventilated church, and one long catechism in a dreary schoolroom. No
gaol can be much duller than a well-regulated middle-class girls’
school. Fay could complain of no ill-treatment. She was well fed,
comfortably housed, warmly clad; but her life was a burden to her.

She had a bad temper; was irritable, impatient, quick to take
offence, and prone to fits of sullenness. This was the opinion of the
authorities; and her faults increased as she grew older. She was not
absolutely rebellious towards the governesses; but there was always
something amiss. She was idle and listless at her studies, took
no interest in anything but her music-lessons, and was altogether
an unsatisfactory pupil. She had no lasting friendships among her
schoolfellows. She was capricious in her likings, and was prone to
fancy herself slighted or ill-treated on the smallest provocation. The
general verdict condemned her as the most disagreeable girl in the
school. With the meaner souls among her schoolfellows it was considered
an affront that she should have no antecedents worth talking about,
no relatives, no home, and no hampers or presents. Even the servants
neglected her as a young person without surroundings, upon whom
kindness would be thrown away. The wardrobe-woman left her clothes
unmended, feeling that it mattered very little in what order they were
kept, since the girl never went home for the holidays, and there was no
mother or aunt to investigate her trunks. She was condemned on every
hand as a discreditable mystery; and when, one unlucky afternoon, a
sultry afternoon at the beginning of a hot summer, she lost her temper
in the middle of a class-lesson, burst into a torrent of angry speech,
half defiance, half reproach, bounced up from her seat, and rushed out
of the schoolroom, there were few to pity, and none to sympathise.

The proprietress of the school was elderly and lymphatic. Miss Fausset
had been stigmatised as a troublesome pupil for a long time. There
were continual complaints about Miss Fausset’s conduct, worrying
complaints, which spoilt Miss Constable’s dinner and interfered with
her digestion. Really, the only course open to that prosperous,
over-fed personage was to get rid of Miss Fausset. There was an amiable
family of three sisters—highly connected young persons, whose father
was in the wine trade—waiting for vacancies in that old-established
seminary.

“We will make a _tabula rasa_ of a troublesome past,” said Miss
Constable, who loved fine words. “Miss Fausset must go.”

Thus it was that John Fausset had been suddenly called upon to find a
new home for his ward; and thus it was that Fay had been brought to
Upper Parchment Street.

No doubt Upper Parchment Street was better than school; but if it had
not been for Mildred the atmosphere on the edge of Hyde Park would
have been no more congenial than the atmosphere at Streatham. Fay
felt herself an intruder in that splendid house, where, amidst that
multitude of pretty things, she could not put her finger upon one
gracious object that belonged to her—nothing that was her “very own,”
as Mildred called it; for she had refused Mildred’s doll and all other
proffered gifts, too proud to profit by a child’s lavish generosity.
Mrs. Fausset made her no gifts, never talked to her, rarely looked at
her.

Fay knew that Mrs. Fausset disliked her. She had divined as much from
the first, and she knew only too well that dislike had grown with
experience. She was allowed to go down to afternoon tea with Mildred;
but had she been deaf and dumb her society could not have been less
cultivated by the mistress of the house. Mrs. Fausset’s feelings were
patent to the whole household, and were common talk in the servants’
hall. “No wonder,” said the women; the men said “What a shame!” but
footmen and housemaids were at one in their treatment of Fay, which
was neglectful, and occasionally insolent. It would hardly have been
possible for them to behave well to the intruder and keep in favour
with Bell, who was absolute—a superior power to butler or housekeeper,
a person with no stated office, and the supreme right to interfere with
everybody.

Bell sighed and shook her head whenever Miss Fay was mentioned. She
bridled with pent-up indignation, as if the girl’s existence were an
injury to her, Martha Bell. “If _I_ hadn’t nursed Mrs. Fausset when
she was the loveliest infant that ever drew breath, _I_ shouldn’t feel
it so much,” said Bell; and then tears would spring to her eyes and
chokings would convulse her throat, and the housekeeper would shake her
head and sympathise mysteriously.

At the end of July the establishment migrated from Parchment Street to
The Hook, Mr. Fausset’s riverside villa between Chertsey and Windsor.
The Hook was an expanse of meadow-land bordered with willows, round
which the river made a loop; and on this enchanted bit of ground—a
spot loved by the river-god—Mr. Fausset had built for himself the most
delightful embodiment of that much-abused word villa; a long, low,
white house, with spacious rooms, broad corridors, a double flight of
marble stairs, meeting on a landing lit by an Italian cupola—a villa
surrounded with a classic colonnade, and looking out upon peerless
gardens sloping to the willow-shadowed stream.

To Fay The Hook seemed like a vision of Paradise. It was almost
happiness even to her impatient spirit to sit in a corner of those
lovely grounds, screened from the outer world by a dense wall of
Portugal laurels and arbutus, with the blue water and the low, flat
meadows of the further shore for her only prospect.

Miss Colville was left behind in London. For Fay and Mildred life was
a perpetual holiday. Mrs. Fausset was almost as much in society at The
Hook as she had been in London. Visitors came and visitors went. She
was never alone. There were parties at Henley and Marlow, and Wargrave
and Goring. Two pairs of horses were kept hard at work carrying Mr. and
Mrs. Fausset about that lovely riverside landscape to garden-parties
and dinners, picnics and regattas. John Fausset went because his wife
liked him to go, and because he liked to see her happy and admired.
The two girls were left, for the most part, to their own devices,
under the supervision of Bell. They lived in the gardens, with an
occasional excursion into the unknown world along the river. There
was a trustworthy under-gardener, who was a good oarsman, and in his
charge Mildred was allowed to go on the water in a big wherry, which
looked substantial enough to have carried a select boarding-school.

This life by the Thames was the nearest approach to absolute happiness
which Fay had ever known; but for her there was to be no such thing as
unbroken bliss. In the midst of the sultry August weather Mildred fell
ill—a mild attack of scarlet fever, which sounded less alarming to Mrs.
Fausset’s ear, because the doctor spoke of it as scarlatina. It was a
very mild case, the local practitioner told Mrs. Fausset; there was
no occasion to send for a London physician; there was no occasion for
alarm. Mildred must keep her bed for a fortnight, and must be isolated
from the rest of the house. Her own maid might nurse her if she had had
the complaint.

“How could she have caught the fever?” Mrs. Fausset asked, with an
injured air; and there was a grand investigation, but no scarlet fever
to be heard of nearer than Maidenhead.

“People are so artful in hiding these things,” said Mrs. Fausset; and
ten minutes afterwards she begged the doctor not to mention Mildred’s
malady to any of her neighbours.

“We have such a host of engagements, and crowds of visitors coming from
London,” she said. “People are so ridiculously nervous. Of course I
shall be extremely careful.”

The doctor gave elaborate instructions about isolation. Such measures
being taken, Mrs. Fausset might receive all fashionable London with
safety.

“And it is really such a mild case that you need not put yourself about
in any way,” concluded the doctor.

“Dear, sweet pet, we must do all we can to amuse her,” sighed the fond
mother.

Mild as the case might be, the patient had to suffer thirst and
headache, a dry and swollen throat, and restless nights. Her most eager
desire was for Fay’s company, and as it was ascertained that Fay had
suffered from scarlet fever some years before in a somewhat severe
form, it was considered she might safely assist in the sick-room.

She was there almost all day, and very often in the night. She read
to Mildred, and sang to her, and played with her, and indulged every
changing fancy and caprice of sickness. Her love was inexhaustible,
indefatigable, for ever on the watch. If Mildred woke from a feverish
dream in the deep of night, with a little agitated sob or cry, she
found a figure in a white dressing-gown bending over her, and loving
arms encircling her before she had time to feel frightened. Fay slept
in a little dressing-room opening out of Mildred’s large, airy bedroom,
so as to be near her darling. It was a mere closet, with a truckle-bed
brought down from the servants’ attic; but it was good enough for Fay,
whose only thought was of the child who loved her as none other had
ever loved within her memory.

Mrs. Fausset was prettily anxious about her child. She would come
to Mildred’s room in her dressing-gown before her leisurely morning
toilet, to hear the last report. She would sit by the bed for five
minutes showering kisses on the pale cheeks, and then she would go
away to her long summer-day of frivolous pleasures and society talk.
Ripples of laughter and snatches of speech came floating in at the
open windows; and at Mildred’s behest Fay would stand at a window and
report the proceedings of that happy world outside.

“They are going out in the boat. They are going to have tea on the
lawn. Your mamma is walking up and down with Sir Horace Clavering. Miss
Grenville and her sister are playing croquet;” and so on, and so on,
all day.

Mildred tossed about on her pretty white bed impatiently.

“It is very horrid being shut up here on these fine days,” she said;
“or it would be horrid without you, Fay. Mamma does not come to see me
much.”

Mamma came three or four times a day; but her visits were of the
briefest. She would come into the room beaming with smiles, looking
like living sunlight in her exquisite white gown, with its delicate
ribbons and cloudy lace—a fleecy white cloud just touched with
rose-colour, as if she were an embodiment of the summer dawn. Sometimes
she brought Mildred a peach, or a bunch of hothouse grapes, or an
orchid, or a new picture-book; but beautiful as these offerings were,
the child did not always value them. She would push the plate of
grapes or the peach aside impatiently when her mother was gone, or she
would entreat Fay to eat the dainty.

“Mamma thinks I am greedy,” she said; “but I ain’t, am I, Fay?”

Those three weeks in the sick-room, those wakeful nights and long, slow
summer days, strengthened the bond of love between the two girls. By
the time Mildred was convalescent they seemed to have loved each other
for years. Mildred could hardly remember what her life was like before
she had Fay for a companion. Mrs. Fausset saw this growing affection
not without jealousy; but it was very convenient that there should be
some one in the house whose companionship kept Mildred happy, and she
even went so far as to admit that Fay was “useful.”

“I cannot be with the dear child half so much as I should like to be,”
she said; “visitors are so exacting.”

Fay had slept very little during Mildred’s illness, and now that the
child was nearly well the elder girl began to flag somewhat, and was
tired early in the evening, and glad to go to bed at the same hour as
the patient, who, under Bell’s supervision, was made to retire before
eight. She was now well enough to sit up all day, and to drive out in a
pony-carriage in the sunny hours after early dinner. Fay went with her,
of course. Pony and landscape would have been wanting in charm without
Fay’s company. Both girls had gone to bed one sultry evening in the
faint gray twilight. Fay was sleeping profoundly; but Mildred, after
dozing a little, was lying half-awake, with closed eyelids, in the
flower-scented room. The day had been exceptionally warm. The windows
were all open, and a door between Mildred’s bedroom and sitting-room
had been left ajar.

Bell was in the sitting-room at her favourite task of clearing up the
scattered toys and books, and reducing all things to mathematical
precision. Meta, Mildred’s German maid, was sitting at needlework
near the window by the light of a shaded lamp. The light shone in the
twilight through the partly-open door, and gave Mildred a sense of
company. They began to talk presently, and Mildred listened, idly at
first, and soothed by the sound of their voices, but afterwards with
keen curiosity.

“I know I shouldn’t like to be treated so,” said Meta.

“_I_ don’t see that she has anything to complain of,” answered Bell.
“She has a good home, and everything provided for her. What more can
she want?”

“I should want a good deal more if I was a heiress.”

“_An_ heiress,” corrected Bell, who prided herself on having cultivated
her mind, and was somewhat pedantic of speech. “That’s all nonsense,
Meta. She’s no more an heiress than I am. Mr. Fausset told my poor
young mistress that just to throw dust in her eyes. Heiress, indeed!
An heiress without a relative in the world that she can speak of—an
heiress that has dropped from the moon. Don’t tell _me_.”

Nobody was telling Mrs. Bell anything; but she had a resentful air, as
if combating the arguments of an invisible adversary.

There was a silence during which Mildred nearly fell asleep; and then
the voices began again.

“It’s impossible for sisters to be fonder of each other than those two
are,” said Meta.

“There’s nothing strange in that, considering they _are_ sisters,”
answered Bell angrily.

“O, but you’ve no right to say that, Mrs. Bell; it’s going too far.”

“Haven’t I a right to use my eyes and ears? Can’t I see the family
look in those two faces, though Miss Mildred is pretty and Miss Fay is
plain? Can’t I hear the same tones in the two voices, and haven’t I
seen his way of bringing that girl into the house, and his guilty look
before my poor injured mistress? Of course they’re sisters. Who could
ever doubt it? _She_ doesn’t, I know, poor dear.”

She, in this connection, meant Mrs. Fausset.

There was only one point in this speech which the innocent child
seized upon. She and Fay were said to be sisters. O, how she had
longed for a sister in the last year or so of her life, since she had
found out the meaning of solitude among fairest surroundings! How all
the brightest things she possessed had palled upon her for want of
sisterly companionship! How she had longed for a baby-sister even, and
had envied the children in households where a new baby was an annual
institution! She had wondered why her mother did not treat herself to a
new baby occasionally, as so many of her mother’s friends did. And now
Fay had been given to her, ever so much better than a baby, which would
have taken such a long time to grow up. Mildred had never calculated
how long, but she concluded that it would be some months before the
most forward baby would be of a companionable age. Fay had been given
to her—a ready-made companion, versed in fairy tales, able to conjure
up an enchanted world out of the schoolroom piano, skilful with pencil
and colour-box, able to draw the faces and figures and palaces and
woodlands of that fairy world, able to amuse and entertain her in a
hundred ways. And Fay was her sister after all. She dropped asleep in a
flutter of pleasurable excitement. She would ask her mother all about
it to-morrow; and in the meantime she would say nothing to Fay. It was
fun to have a secret from Fay.

A batch of visitors left next day after lunch. Mr. and Mrs. Fausset
were to be alone for forty-eight hours, a rare oasis of domesticity in
the society desert. Mildred had been promised that the first day there
was no company she was to have tea with mamma in the tent on the lawn.
She claimed the fulfilment of that promise to-day.

It was a lovely day after the sultry, thundery night. Mrs. Fausset
reclined in her basket-chair in the shelter of the tent. Fay and
Mildred sat side by side on a low bamboo bench on the grass: the
little girl, fairy-like, in her white muslin and flowing flaxen hair,
the big girl in olive-coloured alpaca, with dark hair clustering in
short curls about the small intelligent head. There could hardly have
been a stronger contrast than that between the two girls; and yet
Bell was right. There was a family look, an undefinable resemblance
of contour and expression which would have struck a very attentive
observer—something in the line of the delicate eyebrow, something in
the angle of the forehead.

“Mamma,” said Mildred suddenly, clambering into her mother’s lap, “why
mayn’t I call Fay sister?”

Mrs. Fausset started, and flushed crimson.

“What nonsense, child! Why, because it would be most ridiculous.”

“But she _is_ my sister,” urged Mildred, looking full into her mother’s
eyes, with tremendous resolution in her own. “I love her like a sister,
and she is my sister. Bell says so.”

“Bell is an impertinent person,” cried Mrs. Fausset angrily. “When did
she say so?”

“Last night, when she thought I was asleep. Mayn’t I call Fay sister?”
persisted Mildred coaxingly.

“On no account. I never heard anything so shameful. To think that Bell
should gossip! An old servant like Bell—my own old nurse. It is too
cruel!” cried Mrs. Fausset, forgetting herself in her anger.

Fay stood tall and straight in the sunshine outside the tent, wondering
at the storm. She had an instinctive apprehension that Mrs. Fausset’s
anger was humiliating to her. She knew not why, but she felt a sense
of despair darker than any other evil moment in her life; and yet her
evil moments had been many.

“You need not be afraid that I shall ask Mildred to call me sister,”
she said. “I love her dearly, but I hate everybody else in this house.”

“You are a wicked, ungrateful girl,” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, “and I am
very sorry I ever saw your face.”

Fay drew herself up, looked at the speaker indignantly for a moment or
so, and then walked quietly away towards the house.

She passed the footman with the tea-tray as she crossed the lawn,
and a little further on she passed John Fausset, who looked at her
wonderingly.

Mildred burst out crying.

“How unkind you are, mamma!” she sobbed. “If I mayn’t call her my
sister I shall always love her like a sister—always, always, always.”

“What is the matter with my Mildred?” asked Mr. Fausset, arriving at
this moment.

“Nothing. She has only been silly,” his wife answered pettishly.

“And Fay—has she been silly, too?”

“Fay, your _protégée_, has been most impertinent to me. But I suppose
that does not count.”

“It does count, for a good deal, if she has been intentionally
impertinent,” answered Fausset gravely.

He looked back after Fay’s vanishing figure with a troubled expression.
He had so sighed for peace. He had hoped that the motherless girl
might be taken into his home and cared for and made happy, without
evil feeling upon any one’s part; and now he could see by his wife’s
countenance that the hope of union and peace was at an end.

“I don’t know what you mean about intention,” said his wife; “I only
know that the girl you are so fond of has just said she hates everybody
in this house except Mildred. That sound rather like intentional
impertinence, I think.”

“Go and play, darling,” said Fausset to his child; “or run after Fay,
and bring her back to tea.”

“You show a vast amount of consideration for your wife,” said Mrs.
Fausset.

“My dear Maud, I want you to show a little more consideration for that
girl, who has been so devoted to Mildred all through her illness, and
who has one very strong claim upon a mother’s heart—she is motherless.”

“I should think more of that claim, perhaps, if I knew who her mother
was, and what she was to you,” said Maud Fausset.

“She was once near and dear to me. That is all I can tell you, Maud;
and it ought to be enough.”

“It is more than enough,” his wife answered, trembling from head to
foot, as she rose from her low chair, and walked away from the tent.

John Fausset looked after her irresolutely, went a few steps as if he
meant to follow her, and then turned back to the tent, just as Mildred
reappeared with Fay from another direction.

“We three will have tea together,” he exclaimed, with demonstrative
cheerfulness. “Mamma is not very well, Mildred; she has gone back to
the house. You shall pour out my tea.”

He seated himself in his wife’s chair, and Mildred sat on his knee,
and put her arms round his neck, and adored him with all her power of
adoration. Her household divinity had ever been the father. Perhaps
her baby mind had found out the weakness of one parent and the strength
of the other.

“Fay shall pour out the tea,” she said, with a sense of self-sacrifice.
“It will be a treat for Fay.”

So Fay poured out the tea, and they all three sat in the tent, and were
happy and merry—or seemingly so, perhaps, as concerned John Fausset—for
one whole sunshiny hour, and for the first time Fay felt that she
was not an outsider. Yet there lurked in her mind the memory of Mrs.
Fausset’s anger, and that memory was bitter.

“What am I, that almost everybody should be rude to me?” she asked
herself, as she sat alone that night after Mildred had gone to bed.

From the open windows below came the languid sweetness of a nocturne
by Chopin. Mrs. Fausset was playing her husband to sleep after dinner.
Sure token of reconciliation between husband and wife.

       *       *       *       *       *

The doctor came next morning. He appeared upon alternate days now, and
looked at Mildred in a casual manner, after exhausting the local gossip
with Mrs. Fausset. This morning he and Mrs. Fausset were particularly
confidential before the patient was sent for.

“Admirable!” he exclaimed, when he had looked at her tongue and felt
her pulse; “we are as nearly well as we can be. All we want now is a
little sea-air to set us up for the winter. The great point, my dear
madam”—to Mrs. Fausset—“is to avoid all risk of _sequelæ_. A fortnight
at Brighton or Eastbourne will restore our little friend to perfect
health.”

There were no difficulties in the way of such people as the Faussets,
no question of ways and means. Bell was sent for, and despatched
to Eastbourne by an afternoon train. She was to take lodgings in a
perfect position, and of impeccable repute as to sanitation. Mildred
was to follow next day, under convoy of Meta and the under-butler, a
responsible person of thirty-five.

“Fay must go, too,” exclaimed Mildred; whereupon followed a tragic
scene.

Fay was not to go to Eastbourne. No reasons were assigned for the
decision. Mildred was to ride a donkey; she was to have a pony-carriage
at her disposition; but she was to be without Fay for a whole
fortnight. In a fortnight she would be able to come home again.

“How many days are there in a fortnight?” she asked piteously.

“Fourteen.”

“O Fay, fourteen days away from you!” she exclaimed, clinging with fond
arms round Fay’s neck, and pulling down the dark head on a level with
her own bright hair.

Fay was pale, but tearless, and said not a word. She let Mildred kiss
her, and kissed back again, but in a dead silence. She went into the
hall with the child, and to the carriage-door, and they kissed each
other on the doorstep, and they kissed at the carriage-window; and then
the horses trotted away along the gravel drive, and Fay had a last
glimpse of the fair head thrust out of the window, and the lilies and
roses of a child’s face framed in pale gold hair.

It was a little more than a fortnight before Bell and her charge went
back to The Hook. Mildred had sorely missed her playfellow, but had
consoled herself with a spade and pail on the beach, and a donkey of
venerable aspect, whose chief distinction was his white linen panoply,
on the long dusty roads.

Mrs. Fausset was not at home to receive her daughter. She had a
superior duty at Chertsey, where people of some social importance were
giving a lawn-party. The house seemed empty and silent, and all its
brightness and graceful furniture, and flowers in the hall and on the
staircase, could not atone for that want of human life.

“Where is Fay?” cried Mildred, taking alarm.

Nobody answered a question which was addressed to everybody.

“Fay, Fay, where are you?” cried the child, and then rushed up-stairs
to the schoolroom, light as a lapwing, distracted with that sudden
fear. “Fay, Fay!” The treble cry rang through the house.

No one in the schoolroom, nor in Mildred’s bedroom, nor in the little
room where Fay had slept, nor in the drawing-rooms, whither Mildred
came running, after that futile quest up-stairs.

Bell met her in the hall, with a letter in her hand.

“Your mamma wished to break it to you herself, miss,” said Bell. “Miss
Fay has gone.”

“Gone, where?”

“To Brussels.”

“Where is Brussels?”

“_I_ believe, miss, that it is the capital of Belgium.”

Mildred tore open the letter, which Bell read aloud over the child’s
shoulder.

“I hope you won’t be grieved at losing your playfellow, my dearest pet.
Fay is dreadfully backward in her education, and has no manners. She
has gone to a finishing-school at Brussels, and you may not see her
again for some years.”

And so the years go by, and this story passes on to a time when the
child Mildred is a child no more, but the happy mother of a fair young
daughter, and the wife of an idolised husband.




CHAPTER V.

WITHOUT THE WOLF.


“Father,” said Lola, “there are ever so many people in the village ill
with fever. Isn’t it sad?”

Mr. and Mrs. Greswold, of Enderby Manor, had been submitting to a
fortnight’s dissipation in London, and this was their first Sunday at
home after that interval. They had returned late on the previous night,
and house and gardens had all the sweetness and freshness of a scene to
which one is restored after absence. They had spent the summer morning
in the little village church with their daughter; and now they were
enjoying the leisure interval between church and luncheon.

George Greswold sat in a lounging-chair under a cedar within twenty
yards of the dining-room windows, and Lola was hanging about him as he
read the _Athenæum_, caressing him with little touches of light hands
upon his hair or his coat-collar, adoring him with all her might after
the agony of severance.

She was his only child, and the love between them was passing the love
of the father and daughter of every-day life. It was an almost romantic
attachment.

Like most only daughters, Lola was precocious, far in advance of her
years in thoughtfulness and emotion, though perhaps a little behind
the average girl of twelve in the severities of feminine education.
She had been her mother’s chief companion ever since she could speak,
the confidante of all that mother’s thoughts and fancies, which were
as innocent as those of childhood itself. She had read much more than
most girls of her age, and had been made familiar with poets whose
names are only known to the schoolgirl in a history of literature. She
knew a good deal about the best books in European literature; but, most
of all, she knew the hearts and minds of her father and mother, their
loves and likings, their joys and sorrows. She had never been shut out
from their confidence; she had never been told to go and play when they
wanted to talk to each other. She had sat with them, and walked and
ridden and driven with them ever since she was old enough to dispense
with her nurse’s arms. She had lived her young life with them, and had
been a part of their lives.

George Greswold looked up from his _Athenæum_ in quick alarm.

“Fever!” he exclaimed, “fever at Enderby!”

“Strange, isn’t it, father? Everybody is wondering about it. Enderby
has always been such a healthy village, and you have taken such pains
to make it so.”

“Yes, love, I have done my best. I am a landlord for pleasure, and not
for gain, as you and mother know.”

“And what seems strangest and worst of all,” continued Lola, “is that
this dreadful fever has broken out among the people you and mother and
I are fondest of—our old friends and pensioners—and the children we
know most about. It seems so hard that those you and mother have helped
the most should be the first to be ill.”

“Yes, love, that must seem very hard to my tender-hearted darling.”

Her father looked up at her fondly as she stood behind his chair,
her white arm leaning upon his shoulder. The summer was in its
zenith. It was strawberry-time, rose-time, haymaking-time—the season
of nightingales and meadow-sweet and tall Mary lilies, and all those
lovely things that cluster in the core of summer’s great warm heart.
Lola was all in white—a loose muslin frock, straight from shoulder
to instep. Her thick gold hair fell straight as her frock below her
ungirdled waist, and, in her white and gold, she had the look of an
angel in an early Italian picture. Her eyes were as blue as that
cloudless sky of midsummer which took a deeper azure behind the
black-green branches of the cedar.

“My pet, I take it this fever is some slight summer malady. Cottagers
are such ravens. They always make the worst of an illness.”

“O, but they really have been very bad. Mary Martin has had the fever,
but she is getting better. And there’s Johnny Giles; you know what a
strong boy _he_ is. He’s very bad, poor little chap—so delirious; and I
do feel so sorry for his poor mother. And young Mrs. Peter has it, and
two of her children.”

“It must be contagious,” cried Greswold, seizing his daughter’s round
white arm with an agitated movement. “You have not been to see any
of them, have you, Lola?” he asked, looking at her with unspeakable
anxiety.

“No; Bell wouldn’t let me go to see any of them; but of course I have
taken them things every day—wine and beef-tea and jelly, and everything
we could think of; and they have had as much milk as they liked.”

“You should not have gone yourself with the things, darling. You should
have sent them.”

“That would seem so unkind, as if one hardly cared; and Puck with
nothing to do all the time but to drag me about. It was no trouble to
go myself. I did not even go inside the cottages. Bell said I mustn’t.”

“Bell was right. Well, I suppose there is no harm done if you didn’t
go into any of the cottages; and it was very sweet of you to take the
things yourself; like Red Riding Hood, only without the wolf. There
goes the gong. I hope you are hungry.”

“Not very. The weather is too warm for eating anything but
strawberries.”

He looked at her anxiously again, ready to take alarm at a word.

“Yes, it is too warm in this south-western country,” he said nervously.
“We’ll go to Scotland next week.”

“So soon?”

“Why not a little sooner than usual, for once in a way?”

“I shall be sorry to go away while the people are ill,” she said
gravely.

George Greswold forgot that the gong had sounded. He sat, leaning
forward, in a despondent attitude. The very mention of sickness in
the land had unhinged him. This child was so dear to him, his only
one. He had done all that forethought, sense, and science could do to
make the village which lay at his doors the perfection of health and
purity. Famous sanitarians had been entertained at the Manor, and had
held counsel with Mr. Greswold upon the progress of sanitation, and
its latest developments. They had wondered with him over the blind
ignorance of our forefathers. They had instructed him how to drain his
house, and how to ventilate and purify his cottages. They had assured
him that, so far as lay within the limits of human intelligence,
perfection had been achieved in Enderby village and Enderby Manor House.

And now his idolised daughter hung over his chair and told him that
there was fever raging in the land, his land; the land which he loved
as if it were a living thing, and on which he had lavished care and
money ever since he had owned it. Other men might consider their
ancestral estates as something to be lived upon; George Greswold
thought of his forefathers’ house and lands as something to be lived
for. His cottages were model cottages, and he was known far and wide as
a model landlord.

“George, are you quite forgetting luncheon?” asked a voice from one of
the open windows, and he looked up to see a beautiful face looking out
at him, framed in hair of Lola’s colour.

“My dear Mildred, come here for a moment?” he said, and his wife went
to him, smiling still, but with a shade of uneasiness in her face.

“Go in, pet. We’ll follow you directly,” he said to his daughter; and
then he rose slowly, with an air of being almost broken down by a great
trouble, and put his hand through his wife’s arm, and led her along the
velvet turf beyond the cedar.

“Mildred, have you heard of this fever?”

“Yes; Louisa told me this morning when she was doing my hair. It seems
to be rather bad; but there cannot be any danger, surely, after all you
have done to make the cottages perfect in every way?”

“One cannot tell. There may be a germ of evil brought from somewhere
else. I am sorry Lola has been among the people.”

“O, but she has not been inside any of the cottages. Bell took care to
prevent that.”

“Bell was wise, but she might have done better still. She should have
telegraphed to us. Lola must not go about any more. You will see to
that, won’t you, dearest? Before the end of the week I will take you
both to Scotland.”

“Do you really suppose there can be danger?” she asked, growing very
pale.

“No, no, I don’t apprehend danger. Only it is better to be
over-cautious than over-bold. We cannot be too careful of our treasure.”

“No, no, indeed,” answered the mother, with a piteous look.

“Mother,” called Lola from the window, “are you ever coming? Pomfret
will be late for church.”

Pomfret was the butler, whose convenience had to be studied upon
Sundays. The servants dined while the family were at luncheon, and
almost all the establishment went to afternoon service, leaving a
footman and an under-housemaid in sole possession of the grave old
manor-house, where the silence had a solemnity as in some monastic
chapel. Lola was anxious that luncheon should begin, and Pomfret be
dismissed to eat his dinner.

This child of twelve had more than a woman’s forethought. She spent her
life in thinking about other people; but of all those whom she loved,
and for whom she cared, her father was first and chief. For him her
love was akin to worship.

She watched his face anxiously now, as she took her seat at his right
hand, and was silent until Pomfret had served the soup and retired,
leaving all the rest of the luncheon on the table, and the wine on a
dumb-waiter by his master’s side.

There was always a cold lunch on Sundays, and the evening meal was
also cold, a compromise between dinner and supper, served at nine
o’clock, by which time the servants had gratified their various tastes
for church or chapel, and had enjoyed an evening walk. There was no
parsonage in England where the day of rest was held in more reverence
than it was at Enderby Manor.

Mr. Greswold was no bigot, his religion in no wise savoured of the
over-good school; but he was a man of deep religious convictions; and
he had been brought up to honour Sunday as a day set apart.

The Sunday parties and Sunday amusements of fashionable London were an
abomination to him, though he was far too liberal-minded to wish to
shut museums and picture-galleries against the people.

“Father,” said Lola, when they were alone, “I’m afraid you had your bad
dream last night.”

Greswold looked at her curiously.

“No, love, my dreams were colourless, and have left not even a
remembrance.”

“And yet you look sorrowful, just as you always look after your bad
dream.”

“Your father is anxious about the cottagers who are ill, dearest,” said
Mrs. Greswold. “That is all.”

“But you must not be unhappy about them, father dear. You don’t think
that any of them will die, do you?” asked Lola, drawing very near him,
and looking up at him with awe-stricken eyes.

“Indeed, my love, I hope not. They shall not die, if care can save
them. I will walk round the village with Porter this afternoon, and
find out all about the trouble. If there is anything that he cannot
understand, we’ll have Dr. Hutchinson over from Southampton, or a
physician from London if necessary. My people shall not be neglected.”

“May I go with you this afternoon, father?”

“No, dearest, neither you nor mother must leave the grounds till we go
away. I will have no needless risks run by my dear ones.”

Neither mother nor daughter disputed his will upon this point. He was
the sole arbiter of their lives. It seemed almost as if they lived
only to please him. Both would have liked to go with him; both thought
him over-cautious; yet neither attempted to argue the point. Happy
household in which there are no arguments upon domestic trifles, no
bickerings about the infinitesimals of life!

Enderby Manor was one of those ideal homes which adorn the face of
England and sustain its reputation as the native soil of domestic
virtues, the country in which good wives and good mothers are
indigenous.

There are many such ideal homes in the land as to outward aspect, seen
from the high-road, across park or pasture, shrubbery or flower-garden;
but only a few of these sustain the idea upon intimate knowledge of the
interior.

Here, within as well as without, the atmosphere was peace. Those
velvet lawns and brilliant flower-beds were not more perfect than the
love between husband and wife, child and parents. No cloud had ever
shadowed that serene heaven of domestic peace. George Greswold had
married at thirty a girl of eighteen who adored him; and those two
had lived for each other and for their only child ever since. All
outside the narrow circle of family love counted only as the margin
or the framework of life. All the deepest and sweetest elements of
life were within the veil. Mildred Greswold could not conceive a
fashionable woman’s existence—a life given up to frivolous occupations
and futile excitements—a life of empty pleasure faintly flavoured with
art, literature, science, philanthropy, and politics, and fancying
itself eminently useful and eminently progressive. She had seen such
an existence in her childhood, and had wondered that any reasoning
creature could so live. She had turned her back upon the modish world
when she married George Greswold, and had surrendered most of the
delights of society to lead quiet days in her husband’s ancestral home,
loving that old house for his sake, as he loved it for the sake of the
dead.

They were not in outer darkness, however, as to the movement of the
world. They spent a fortnight at Limmers occasionally, when the fancy
moved them. They saw all the pictures worth seeing, heard a good deal
of the best music, mixed just enough in society to distinguish gold
from tinsel, and to make a happy choice of friends.

They occasionally treated themselves to a week in Paris, and their
autumn holidays were mostly spent in a shooting-box twenty miles
beyond Inverness. They came back to the Manor in time for the
pheasant-shooting, and the New Year generally began with a house-party
which lasted with variations until the hunting was all over, and the
young leaves were green in the neighbouring forest. No lives could
have been happier, or fuller of interest; but the interest all centred
in home. Farmers and cottagers on the estate were cared for as a part
of home; and the estate itself was loved almost as a living thing by
husband and wife, and the fair child who had been born to them in the
old-fashioned house.

The grave red-brick manor-house had been built when William III.
was King; and there were some Dutch innovations in the Old English
architecture, notably a turret or pavilion at the end of each wing,
and a long bowling-green on the western side of the garden. The walls
had that deep glowing red which is only seen in old brickwork, and the
black glazed tiles upon the hopper roof glittered in the sunlight with
the prismatic hues of antique Rhodian glass. The chief characteristic
of the interior was the oak-panelling, which clothed the rooms
and corridors as in a garment of sober brown, and would have been
suggestive of gloom but for the pictures and porcelain which brightened
every wall, and the rich colouring of brocaded curtains and tapestry
_portières_. The chief charm of the house was the aspect of home life,
the books and musical instruments, the art treasures, and flowers,
and domestic trifles to be seen everywhere; the air which every room
and every nook and corner had of being lived in by home-loving and
home-keeping people.

The pavilion at the end of the south-west wing was Lola’s special
domain, that and the room communicating with it. That pretty
sitting-room, with dwarf book-shelves, water-colour pictures, and
Wedgwood china, was never called a schoolroom. It was Lola’s study.

“There shall be no suggestion of school in our home,” said George
Greswold.

It was he who chose his daughter’s masters, and it was often he who
attended during the lesson, listening intently to the progress of the
work, and as keenly interested in the pupil’s progress as the pupil
herself. Latin he himself taught her, and she already knew by heart
those noblest of Horace’s odes which are fittest for young lips. Their
philosophy saddened her a little.

“Is life always changing?” she asked her father; “must one never
venture to be quite happy?”

The Latin poet’s pervading idea of mutability, inevitable death, and
inevitable change impressed her with a flavour of sadness, child as she
was.

“My dearest, had Horace been a Christian, as you are, and had he lived
for others, as you do, he would not have been afraid to call himself
happy,” answered George Greswold. “He was a Pagan, and he put on the
armour of philosophy for want of the armour of faith.”

These lessons in the classics, taking a dead language not as a dry
study of grammar and dictionary, but as the gate to new worlds of
poetry and philosophy, had been Lola’s delight. She was in no wise
unpleasantly precocious; but she was far in advance of the conventional
schoolroom child, trained into characterless uniformity by a superior
governess. Lola had never been under governess rule. Her life at the
Manor had been as free as that of the butterflies. There was only Bell
to lecture her—white-haired Mrs. Bell, thin and spare, straight as an
arrow, at seventy-four years of age, the embodiment of servants’-hall
gentility, in her black silk afternoon gown and neat cambric cap—Bell,
who looked after Lola’s health, and Lola’s rooms, and was for ever
tidying the drawers and tables, and lecturing upon the degeneracy of
girlhood. It was her boast to have nursed Lola’s grandmother, as well
as Lola’s mother, which seemed going back to the remoteness of the dark
ages.

Enderby Manor was three miles from Romsey, and within riding or driving
distance of the New Forest and of Salisbury Cathedral. It lay in the
heart of a pastoral district watered by the Test, and was altogether
one of the most enjoyable estates in that part of the country.

Before luncheon was finished a messenger was on his way to the
village to summon Mr. Porter, more commonly Dr. Porter, the parish
and everybody’s doctor, an elderly man of burly figure, close-cropped
gray hair, and yeoman-like bearing—a man born on the soil, whose
father and grandfather and great-grandfather had cured or killed the
inhabitants of Enderby parish from time immemorial. Judging from the
tombstones in the pretty old churchyard, they must have cured more than
they killed; for those crumbling moss-grown stones bore the record of
patriarchal lives, and the union near Enderby was a museum of incipient
centenarians.

Mr. Porter came into the grave old library at the Manor looking more
serious than his wont, perhaps in sympathy with George Greswold’s
anxious face, turned towards the door as the footman opened it.

“Well, Porter, what does it all mean, this fever?” asked Greswold
abruptly.

Mr. Porter had a manner of discussing a case which was all his own.
He always appealed to his patient with a professional air, as if
consulting another medical authority, and a higher one than himself. It
was flattering, perhaps, but not always satisfactory.

“Well, you see, there’s the high temperature—104 in some cases—and
there’s the inflamed throat, and there’s headache. What do _you_ say?”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Porter; you must know whether it is an infectious
fever or not. If you don’t know, we’ll send to Southampton for
Hutchinson.”

“Of course, you can have him if you like. I judge more by temperature
than anything—the thermometer is a safer guide than the pulse, as you
know. I took their temperatures this morning before I went to church:
only one case in which there was improvement—all the others decidedly
worse; very strongly developed cases of malignant fever—typhus or
typhoid—which, as you know, by Jenner’s differentiation of the two
forms—”

“For God’s sake, man, don’t talk to me as if I were a doctor, and had
your ghoulish relish of disease! If you have the slightest doubt as to
treatment, send for Hutchinson.”

He took a sheaf of telegraph-forms from the stand in front of him, and
began to write his message while he was talking. He had made up his
mind that Dr. Hutchinson must come to see these humble sufferers, and
to investigate the cause of evil. He had taken such pains to create a
healthy settlement, had spared no expense; and for fifteen years, from
the hour of his succession until now, all had gone well with him. And
now there was fever in the land, fever in the air breathed by those two
beloved ones, daughter and wife.

“I have been so happy; my life has been cloudless, save for one dark
memory,” he said to himself, covering his face with his hands as he
leaned with his elbows on the table, while Mr. Porter expatiated upon
the cases in the village, and on fever in general.

“I have tested the water in all the wells—perfectly pure. There can be
nothing amiss with the milk, for all my patients are on Mrs. Greswold’s
list, and are getting their milk from your own dairy. The drainage
is perfection—yet here we have an outbreak of fever, which looks
remarkably like typhoid?”

“Why not say at once that it is typhoid?”

“The symptoms all point that way.”

“You say there can be nothing amiss with the milk. You have not
analysed it, I suppose?”

“Why should I? Out of your own dairy, where everything is managed in
the very best way—the perfection of cleanliness in every detail.”

“You ought to have analysed the milk, all the same,” said Greswold
thoughtfully. “The strength of a chain is its weakest link. There may
be some weak link here, though we cannot put our fingers upon it—yet.
Are there many cases?”

“Let me see. There’s Johnny Giles, and Mrs. Peter and her children, and
Janet Dawson, and there’s Andrew Rogers, and there’s Mary Rainbow,”
began Mr. Porter, counting on his fingers as he went on, until the list
of sufferers came to eleven. “Mostly youngsters,” he said in conclusion.

“They ought to have been isolated,” said Greswold. “I will get out
plans for an infirmary to-morrow. There is the willow-field, on the
other side of the village, a ridge of high ground sloping down
towards the parish drain, with a southern exposure, a capital site for
a hospital. It is dreadful to think of fever-poison spreading from
half-a-dozen different cottages. Which was the first case?”

“Little Rainbow.”

“That fair-haired child whom I used to see from my dressing-room window
every morning as she went away from the dairy, tottering under a
pitcher of milk? Poor little Polly! She was a favourite with us all. Is
she very ill?”

“Yes, I think hers is about the best case,” answered the doctor
unctuously; “the others are a little vague; but there’s no doubt about
_her_, all the symptoms strongly marked—a very clear case.”

“Is there any danger of a fatal termination?”

“I’m afraid there is.”

“Poor little Polly—poor pretty little girl! I used to know it was seven
o’clock when I saw that bright little flaxen head flit by the yew hedge
yonder. Polly was as good a timekeeper as any clock in the village. And
you think she may die? You have not told Lola, I hope?”

“No, I have not let out anything about danger. Lola is only too anxious
already.”

“I will put the infirmary in hand to-morrow; and I will take my wife
and daughter to Scotland on Tuesday.”

“Upon my word, it will be a very good thing to get them away. These
fever cases are so mysterious. There’s no knowing what shape infection
may take. I have the strongest belief in your system of drainage—”

“Nothing is perfect,” said Greswold impatiently. “The science of
sanitation is still in its infancy. I sometimes think we have not
advanced very far from the knowledge of our ancestors, whose homes were
desolated by the Black Death. However, don’t let us talk, Porter. Let
us act, if we can. Come and look at the dairy.”

“You don’t apprehend evil there?”

“There are three sources of typhoid poison—drainage, water, milk. You
say the drains and the water are good, and that the milk comes from my
own dairy. If you are right as to the first and second, the third must
be wrong, no matter whose dairy it may come from.”

He took up his hat, and went out of the house with the doctor. Gardens
and shrubberies stretched before them in all their luxuriance of summer
verdure, gardens and shrubberies which had been the delight and pride
of many generations of Greswolds, but loved more dearly by none than by
George Greswold and his wife. In Mildred’s mind the old family house
was a part of her husband’s individuality, an attribute rather than
a mere possession. Every tree and every shrub was sacred. These, his
mother’s own hands had cropped and tended; those, grandfathers and
great-grandfathers and _arrière_ great-grandfathers had planted in
epochs that distance has made romantic.

On the right of the hall-door a broad gravel path led in a serpentine
sweep towards the stables, a long, low building spread over a
considerable area, and hidden by shrubberies. The dairy was a little
further off, approached by a winding walk through thickets of laurel
and arbutus. It had been originally a barn, and was used as a
receptacle for all manner of out-of-door lumber when Mildred came to
the Manor. She had converted the old stone building into a model dairy,
with outside gallery and staircase of solid woodwork, and with a Swiss
roof. Other buildings had been added. There were low cowhouses, and
tall pigeon-houses, and a picturesque variety of gables and elevations
which was delightful to the eye, seen on a summer afternoon such as
this June Sunday, amidst the perfume of clove carnations and old
English roses, and the cooing of doves.

Mrs. Greswold’s Channel Island cows were her delight—creatures with
cream-coloured coats, black noses, and wistful brown eyes. Scarcely a
day passed on which she did not waste an hour or so in the cowhouses
or in the meadows caressing these favourites. Each cow had her name
painted in blue and white above her stall, and the chief, or duchess of
the herd, was very severe in the maintenance of cowhouse precedence,
and knew how to resent the insolence of a new-comer who should presume
to cross the threshold in advance of her.

The dairy itself had a solemn and shadowy air, like a shrine, and
was as pretty as the dairy at Frogmore. The walls were lined with
Minton tiles, the shallow milk-pans were of Doulton pottery, and
quaintly-shaped pitchers of bright colours were ranged on china
brackets along the walls. The windows were latticed, and a pane
of ruby, rose, or amethyst appeared here and there among the old
bottle-green glass, and cast a patch of coloured light upon the cool
marble slab below.

The chief dairy-woman lived at an old-fashioned cottage on the
premises, with her husband, the cowkeeper; and their garden, which
lay at the back of the cowhouses and dairy, was the ideal old English
garden, in which flowers and fruit strive for the mastery. In a corner
of this garden, close to the outer offices of the cottage, among rows
of peas, and summer cabbages, and great overgrown lavender-bushes and
moss-roses, stood the old well, with its crumbling brick border and
ancient spindle, a well that had been dug when the old manor-house was
new.

There were other water arrangements for Mrs. Greswold’s dairy, a new
artesian well, on a hill a quarter of a mile from the kitchen-garden,
a well that went deep down into the chalk, and was famous for the
purity of its water. All the drinking-water of the house was supplied
from this well, and the water was laid on in iron pipes to dairy and
cowhouses. All the vessels used for milk or cream were washed in this
water; at least, such were Mr. Greswold’s strict orders—orders supposed
to be carried out under the supervision of his bailiff and housekeeper.

Mr. Porter looked at a reeking heap of stable manure that sprawled
within twenty feet of the old well with suspicion in his eye, and from
the manure-heap he looked at the back premises of the old cob-walled
cottage.

“I’m afraid there may have been soakage from that manure-heap into the
well,” he said; “and if your dairy vessels are washed in that water—”

“But they never are,” interrupted Mr. Greswold; “that water is used
only for the garden—eh, Mrs. Wadman?”

The dairy-woman was standing on the threshold of her neat little
kitchen, curtseying to her master, resplendent in her Sunday gown of
bright blue merino, and her Sunday brooch, containing her husband’s
photograph, coloured out of knowledge.

“No, of course not, sir; leastways, never except when there was
something wrong with the pipes from the artesian.”

“Something wrong; when was that? I never heard of anything wrong.”

“Well, sir, my husband didn’t want to be troublesome, and Mr. Thomas
he gave the order for the men from Romsey, that was on the Saturday
after working-hours, and they was to come as it might be on the Monday
morning, and they never come near; and Mr. Thomas he wrote and wrote,
and my husband he says it ain’t no use writing, and he takes the pony
and rides over to Romsey in his overtime, and he complains about the
men not coming, and they tells him there’s a big job on at Broadlands
and not a plumber to be had for love or money; but the pipes is all
right _now_, sir.”

“Now? Since when have they been in working order?”

“Since yesterday, sir. Mr. Thomas was determined he’d have everything
right before you came back.”

“And how long have you been using that water,” pointing to the well,
with its moss-grown brickwork and flaunting margin of yellow stonecrop,
“for dairy purposes?”

“Well, you see, sir, we was obliged to use water of some kind; and
there ain’t purer or better water than that for twenty mile round. I
always use it for my kettle every time I make tea for me or my master,
and never found no harm from it in the last fifteen years.”

“How long have you used it for the dairy?” repeated George Greswold
angrily; “can’t you give a straight answer, woman?”

Mrs. Wadman could not: had never achieved a direct reply to a plain
question within the memory of man.

“The men was to have come on the Monday morning, first thing,” she
said, “and they didn’t come till the Tuesday week after that, and then
they was that slow——”

George Greswold walked up and down the garden path, raging.

“She won’t answer!” he cried. “Was it a week—a fortnight—three weeks
ago that you began to use that water for your dairy?” he asked sternly;
and gradually he and the doctor induced her to acknowledge that the
garden well had been in use for the dairy nearly three weeks before
yesterday.

“Then that is enough to account for everything,” said Dr.
Porter. “First there is filtration of manure through a gravelly
soil—inevitable—and next there is something worse. She had her sister
here from Salisbury—six weeks ago—down with typhoid fever three days
after she came—brought it from Salisbury.”

“Yes, yes—I remember. You told me there was no danger of infection.”

“There need have been none. I made her use all precautions possible
in an old-fashioned cottage; but however careful she might be, there
would be always the risk of a well—close at hand like that one—getting
tainted. I asked her if she ever used that water for anything but the
garden, and she said no, the artesian well supplied every want. And now
she talks about her kettle, and tells us coolly that she has been using
that polluted water for the last three weeks—and poisoning a whole
village.”

“Me poisoning the village! O Dr. Porter, how can you say such a cruel
thing? Me, that wouldn’t hurt a fly if I knew it!”

“Perhaps not, Mrs. Wadman; but I’m afraid you’ve hurt a good many of
your neighbours without knowing it.”

George Greswold stood in the pathway silent and deadly pale. He had
been so happy for the last thirteen years—a sky without a cloud—and now
in a moment the clouds were closing round him, and again all might be
darkness, as it had been once before in his life. Calamity for which he
felt himself unaccountable had come upon him before—swift as an arrow
from the bow—and now again he stood helpless, smitten by the hand of
Fate.

He thought of the little village child, with her guileless face,
looking up at his window as she tripped by with her pitcher. His dole
of milk had been fatal to the simple souls who had looked up to him
as a Providence. He had taken such pains that all should be sweet and
wholesome in his people’s cottages; he had spent money like water, and
had lectured them and taught them; and lo! from his own luxurious home
the evil had gone forth. Careless servants, hushing up a difficulty,
loth to approach him with plain facts lest they should be considered
troublesome, had wrought this evil, had spread disease and death in the
land.

And his own and only child, the delight of his life, the apple of
his eye—that tainted milk had been served at her table! Amidst all
that grace of porcelain and flowers the poison had lurked, as at the
cottagers’ board. What if she, too, should suffer?

He meant to take her away in a day or two—now—now when the cause of
evil was at work no longer. The thought that it might be too late, that
the germ of poison might lurk in the heart of that fair flower, filled
him with despair.

Mrs. Wadman had run into her cottage, shedding indignant tears at Dr.
Porter’s cruelty. She came out again, with a triumphant air, carrying
a tumbler of water.

“Just look at it, sir,” she said; “look how bright and clear it is.
There never was better water.”

“My good woman, in this case brightness and clearness mean corruption,”
said the doctor. “If you’ll give me a pint of that water in a bottle
I’ll take it home with me, and test it before I sleep to-night.”




CHAPTER VI.

“AH! PITY! THE LILY IS WITHERED.”


George Greswold left the dairy-garden like a man stricken to death.
He felt as if the hand of Fate were on him. It was not his fault that
this evil had come upon him, that these poor people whom he had tried
to help suffered by his bounty, and were perhaps to die for it. He had
done all that human foresight could do; but the blind folly of his
servants had stultified his efforts. Nothing in a London slum could
have been worse than this evil which had come about in a gentleman’s
ornamental dairy, upon premises where money had been lavished to secure
the perfection of scientific sanitation.

Mr. Porter murmured some hopeful remark as they went back to the house.

“Don’t talk about it, Porter,” Greswold answered impatiently; “nothing
could be worse—nothing. Do all you can for these poor people—your
uttermost, mind, your uttermost. Spare neither time nor money. Save
them, if you can.”

“You may be assured I shall do my best. There are only three or four
very bad cases.”

“Three or four! My God, how horrible! Three or four people murdered by
the idiocy of my servants.”

“Joe Stanning—not much chance for him, I’m afraid—and Polly Rainbow.”

“Polly—poor pretty little Polly! O Porter, you _must_ save her! You
must perform a miracle, man. That is what genius means in a doctor. The
man of genius does something that all other doctors have pronounced
impossible. You will have Hutchinson over to-morrow. He may be able to
help you.”

“If she live till to-morrow. I’m afraid it’s a question of a few hours.”

George Greswold groaned aloud.

“And my daughter has been drinking the same tainted milk. Will she be
stricken, do you think?” he asked, with an awful calmness.

“God forbid! Lola has such a fine constitution and the antecedent
circumstances are different. I’ll go and have a look at my patients,
and come back to you late in the evening with the last news.”

They parted by a little gate at the corner of a thick yew hedge, which
admitted Mr. Greswold into his wife’s flower-garden: a very old garden,
which had been the care and delight of many generations; a large square
garden, with broad flower-beds on each side, a stone sundial in the
centre of a grass-plot, and a buttressed wall at the end, a massive old
wall of vermilion brickwork, honeycombed by the decay of centuries,
against which a double rank of hollyhocks made a particoloured screen,
while flaunting dragon’s-mouth and yellow stonecrop made a flame of
colour on the top.

There was an old stone summer-house in each angle of that end wall,
temples open to the sun and air, and raised upon three marble steps,
stained with moss and lichen.

Charming as these antique retreats were to muse or read in, Mildred
Greswold preferred taking tea on the lawn, in the shadow of the two
old cedars. She was sitting in a low garden-chair, with a Japanese
tea-table at her side, and a volume of Robertson’s sermons on her lap.

It was a rule of life at Enderby Manor that only books of pious
tendency should be read on Sundays. The Sunday library was varied and
well chosen. Nobody ever found the books dull or the day too long. The
dedication of that one day in seven to godliness and good works had
never been an oppression to Mildred Greswold.

She remembered her mother’s Sundays—days of hasty church, and slow
elaborate dressing for afternoon or evening gaieties; days of church
parade and much praise of other people’s gowns and depreciation of
other people’s conduct; days of gadding about and running from place to
place; Sunday luncheons, Sunday musical parties, Sunday expeditions up
the river, Sunday in the studios, Sunday at Richmond or Greenwich. Mrs.
Greswold remembered the fussy emptiness of that fashionable Sunday, and
preferred sermons and tranquil solitude in the manor gardens.

Solitude meant a trinity of domestic love. Husband, wife, and
daughter spent their Sundays together. Those were blessed days for
the wife and daughter, since there were no business engagements, no
quarter-sessions, or interviews with the bailiff, or letter-writing,
to rob them of the society they both loved best in the world. George
Greswold devoted his Sundays entirely to his Creator and his home.

“Where is Lola?” he asked, surprised to find his wife alone at this
hour.

“She has a slight headache, and I persuaded her to lie down for an hour
or so.”

The father’s face blanched. A word was enough in his overwrought
condition.

“Porter must see her,” he said; “and I have just let him leave me. I’ll
send some one after him.”

“My dear George, it is nothing; only one of her usual headaches.”

“You are sure she was not feverish?”

“I think not. It never occurred to me. She has often complained of
headache since she began to grow so fast.”

“Yes, she has shot up like a tall white lily—my lily!” murmured the
father tenderly.

He sank into a chair, feeling helpless, hopeless almost, under that
overpowering sense of fatality—of undeserved evil.

“Dear George, you look so ill this afternoon,” said his wife, with
tender anxiety, laying her hand on his shoulder, and looking earnestly
at him, as he sat there in a downcast attitude, his arms hanging
loosely, his eyes bent upon the ground. “I’m afraid the heat has
overcome you.”

“Yes, it has been very hot. Do me a favour, Mildred. Go into the
house, and send somebody to find Porter. He was going the round of the
cottages where there are sick people. He can easily be found. I want
him to see Lola, at once.”

“I’ll send after him, George; but, indeed, I don’t see any need for a
doctor. Lola is so strong; her headaches pass like summer clouds. O
George, you don’t think that _she_ is going to have fever, like the
cottagers!” cried Mildred, full of a sudden terror.

“No, no; of course not. Why should she have the fever? But Porter might
as well see her at once—at once. I hate delay in such cases.”

His wife hurried away without a word. He had imbued her with all his
own fears.

He sat in the garden, just as she had left him, motionless, benumbed
with sorrow. There might, indeed, be no ground for this chilling fear;
others might die, and his beloved might still go unscathed. But she had
been subjected to the same poison, and at any moment the same symptoms
might show themselves. For the next week or ten days he must be haunted
by a hideous spectre. He would make haste to get his dearest one away
to the strong fresh mountain air, to the salt breath of the German
Ocean; but if the poison had already tainted that young life, mountain
and sea could not save her from the fever. She must pass through the
furnace, as those others were passing.

“Poor little Polly Rainbow! The only child of a widow; the only one;
like mine,” he said to himself.

He sat in the garden till dusk, brooding, praying dumbly, unutterably
sad. The image of the widow of Nain was in his mind while he sat
there. The humble funeral train, the mourning mother, and that divine
face shining out of the little group of peasant faces, radiant with
intellect and faith—among them, but not of them—and the uplifted hand
beckoning the dead man from the bier.

“The age of miracles is past,” he thought: “there is no Saviour in
the land to help _me_! In my day of darkness Heaven made no sign. I
was left to suffer as the worms suffer under the ploughshare, and to
wriggle back to life as best I could, like them.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It was growing towards the summer darkness when he rose and went into
the house, where he questioned the butler, whom he met in the hall.
Mr. Porter had been brought back, and had seen Miss Greswold. He had
found her slightly feverish, and had ordered her to go to bed. Mrs.
Greswold was sitting with her. Did Dr. Porter seem anxious? No, not at
all anxious; but he was going to send Miss Laura some medicine before
bedtime.

It was after nine now, but Greswold could not stay in the house. He
wanted to know how it fared with his sick tenantry—most of all with the
little flaxen-haired girl he had so often noticed of late.

He went out into the road that led to the village, a scattered colony,
a cottage here and there, or a cluster of cottages and gardens on a bit
of rising ground above the road. There was a common a little way from
the Manor, a picturesque, irregular expanse of hollows and hillocks,
skirted by a few cottages, and with a fir plantation shielding it from
the north. Mrs. Rainbow’s cottage stood between the common and the
fir-wood, an old half-timbered cottage, very low, with a bedroom in
the roof, and a curious dormer-window, with a thatched arch projecting
above the lattice, like an overhanging eyebrow. The little garden was
aflame with scarlet bean-blossom, roses, and geraniums, and the perfume
of sweet-peas filled the air.

Greswold heard the doctor talking in the upper chamber as he stood by
the gate. The deep, grave tones were audible in the evening stillness,
and there was another sound that chilled the Squire’s heart: the sound
of a woman’s suppressed weeping.

He waited at the gate. He had not the nerve to go into the cottage and
face that sorrowing widow. It seemed to him as if the child’s peril
were his fault. It was not enough that he had taken all reasonable
precautions. He ought to have foreseen the idiocy of his servants. He
ought to have been more on the alert to prevent evil.

The great round moon came slowly up out of a cluster of Scotch firs.
How black the branches looked against that red light! Slowly, slowly
gliding upward in a slanting line, the moon stole at the back of those
black branches, and climbed into the open sky.

How often Lola had watched such a moonrise at his side, and with what
keen eyes she had noted the beauty of the spectacle! It was not that he
had trained her to observe and to feel the loveliness of nature. With
her that feeling had been an instinct, born with her, going before the
wisdom of maturity, the cultivated taste of travelled experience.

To-night she was lying in her darkened room, the poor head heavy and
painful on the pillow. She would not see the moon rising slowly yonder
in that cloudless sky.

“No matter; she will see it to-morrow, I hope,” he said to himself,
trying to be cheerful. “I am a morbid fool to torment myself; she has
been subject to headaches of late. Mildred is right.”

And then he remembered that death and sorrow were near—close to him
as he stood there watching the moon. He remembered poor little Polly
Rainbow, and desponded again.

A woman’s agonised cry broke the soft summer stillness, and pierced
George Greswold’s heart.

“The child is dead!” he thought.

Yes, poor little Polly was gone. The widow came out to the gate
presently, sobbing piteously, and clasped Mr. Greswold’s hand and cried
over it, broken down by her despair, leaning against the gate-post, as
if her limbs had lost the power to bear her up.

“O, sir, she was my all!” she sobbed; “she was my all!”

She could say no more than this, but kept repeating it again and again.
“She was all I had in the world; the only thing I cared for.”

George Greswold touched her shoulder with protecting gentleness.
There was not a peasant in the village for whom he had not infinite
tenderness—pitying their infirmities, forgiving their errors,
inexhaustible in benevolence towards them all. He had set himself to
make his dependents happy as the first duty of his position. And yet he
had done them evil unwittingly. He had cost this poor widow her dearest
treasure—her one ewe lamb.

“Bear up, if you can, my good soul,” he said; “I know that it is hard.”

“Ah, sir, you’d know it better if it was your young lady that was
stricken down!” exclaimed the widow bitterly; and the Squire walked
away from the cottage-gate without another word.

Yes, he would know it better then. His heart was heavy enough now. What
would it be like if _she_ were smitten?

       *       *       *       *       *

She was much the same next day: languid, with an aching head and some
fever. She was not very feverish. On the whole, the doctor was hopeful,
or he pretended to be so. He could give no positive opinion yet, nor
could Dr. Hutchinson. They were both agreed upon that point; and they
were agreed that the polluted water in the garden well had been the
cause of the village epidemic. Analysis had shown that it was charged
with poisonous gas.

Mr. Greswold hastened his preparations for the journey to Scotland with
a feverish eagerness. He wrote to engage a sleeping-carriage on the
Great Northern. They were to travel on Thursday, leaving home before
noon, dining in town, and starting for the North in the evening. If
Lola’s illness were indeed the slight indisposition which everybody
hoped it was, she might be quite able to travel on Thursday, and the
change of air and the movement would do her good.

“She is always so well in Scotland,” said her father.

No, there did not seem much amiss with her. She was very sweet, and
even cheerful, when her father went into her room to sit beside her
bed for a quarter of an hour or so. The doctors had ordered that she
should be kept very quiet, and a hospital nurse had been fetched from
Salisbury to sit up at night with her. There was no necessity for such
care, but it was well to do even a little too much where so cherished a
life was at stake. People had but to look at the father’s face to know
how precious that frail existence was to him. Nor was it less dear to
the mother; but she seemed less apprehensive, less bowed down by gloomy
forebodings.

Yes, Lola was quite cheerful for those few minutes in which her father
sat by her side. The strength of her love overcame her weakness. She
forgot the pain in her head, the weariness of her limbs, while he was
there. She questioned him about the villagers.

“How is little Polly going on?” she asked.

He dared not tell the truth. It would have hurt him too much to speak
to her of death.

“She is going on very well; all is well, love,” he said, deceiving her
for the first time in his life.

This was on Tuesday, and the preparations for Scotland were still
in progress. Mr. Greswold’s talk with his daughter was all of their
romantic Highland home, of the picnics and rambles, the fishing
excursions and sketching parties they would have there. The nurse sat
in a corner and listened to them with a grave countenance, and would
not allow Mr. Greswold more than ten minutes with his daughter.

He counted the hours till they should be on the road for the North.
There would be the rest of Tuesday and all Wednesday. She would be up
and dressed on Wednesday, no doubt; and on Thursday morning the good
old gray carriage-horses would take them all off to Romsey Station—such
a pretty drive on a summer morning, by fields and copses, with
changeful glimpses of the silvery Test.

Dr. Hutchinson came on Tuesday evening, and found his patient not quite
so well. There was a long conference between the two doctors, and then
the nurse was called in to receive her instructions; and then Mr.
Greswold was told that the journey to Scotland must be put off for a
fortnight at the very least.

He received the sentence as if it had been his death-warrant. He asked
no questions. He dared not. A second nurse was to be sent over from
Southampton next morning. The two doctors had the cool, determined air
of men who are preparing for a battle.

Lola was light-headed next morning; but with intervals of calmness and
consciousness. She heard the church bell tolling, and asked what it
meant.

“It’s for Polly Rainbow’s funeral,” answered the maid who was tidying
the room.

“O, no,” cried Lola, “that can’t be! Father said she was better.”

And then her mind began to wander, and she talked of Polly Rainbow as
if the child had been in the room: talked of the little girl’s lessons
at the parish school, and of a prize that she was to get.

After that all was darkness, all was despair—a seemingly inevitable
progress from bad to worse. Science, care, love, prayers—all were
futile; and the bell that had tolled for the widow’s only child tolled
ten days afterwards for Lola.

It seemed to George Greswold as those slow strokes beat upon his brain,
heavily, heavily, like minute guns, that all the hopes and cares and
joys and expectations life had held for him were over. His wife was
on her knees in the darkened house from which the funeral train was
slowly moving, and he had loved her passionately; and yet it seemed to
him as if the open car yonder, with its coffin hidden under snow-white
blossoms, was carrying away all that had ever been precious to him upon
this earth.

“She was the morning, with its promise of day,” he said to himself.
“She was the spring-time, with its promise of summer. While I had her
I lived in the future; henceforward I can only live in the present. I
dare not look back upon the past!”




CHAPTER VII.

DRIFTING APART.


George Greswold and his wife spent the rest of that fatal year in a
villa on the Lake of Thun, an Italian villa, with a campanello tower,
and a long white colonnade, and stone balconies overhanging lawn and
gardens, where the flowers grew in a riotous profusion. The villa
was midway between two of the boat-stations, and there was no other
house near, and this loneliness was its chief charm for those two
heart-broken mourners. They yearned for no sympathy, they cared for no
companionship—hardly even for that of each other, close as the bond of
love had been till now. Each seemed to desire above all things to be
alone with that great grief—to hug that dear, sad memory in silence
and solitude. Only to see them from a distance, from the boat yonder,
as it glided swiftly past that flowery lawn, an observer would have
guessed at sorrow and bereavement from the mere attitude of either
mourner—the man sitting with his head bent forward, brooding on the
ground, the unread newspaper lying across his knee; the woman on the
other side of the lawn, beyond speaking distance, half reclining in
a low basket-chair, with her hands clasped above her head, gazing
at the distant line of snow mountains in listless vacancy. The huge
tan-coloured St. Bernard, snapping with his great cavern-like jaws at
infinitesimal flies, was the only object that gave life to the picture.

The boats went by in sunshine and cloud, the boats went by under
torrential rain, which seemed to fuse lake and mountains, villas and
gardens, into one watery chaos; the boats went by, and the days passed
like the boats, and made no difference in the lives of those two
mourners. Nothing could ever make any difference to either of them for
evermore, it seemed to Mildred. It was as if some spring had broken in
the machinery of life. Even love seemed dead.

“And yet he was once so fond of me, and I of him,” thought the wife,
watching her husband’s face, with its curious look of absence—the look
of a window with the blind down.

There were times when that look of utter abstraction almost frightened
Mildred Greswold. It was an expression she had seen occasionally during
her daughter’s lifetime, and which had always made her anxious. It
was the look about which Lola used to say when they all met at the
breakfast-table,

“Papa has had his bad dream again.”

That bad dream was no invention of Lola’s, but a stern reality in
George Greswold’s life. He would start up from his pillow in an agony,
muttering broken sentences in that voice of the sleeper which seems
always different from his natural voice—as if he belonged to another
world. Cold beads of sweat would start out upon his forehead, and the
wife would put her arms round him and soothe him as a mother soothes
her frightened child, until the muttering ceased and he sank upon
his pillow exhausted, to lapse into quiet sleep, or else awoke and
recovered calmness in awakening.

The dream—whatever it was—always left its mark upon him next day. It
was a kind of nightmare, he told his wife, when she gently questioned
him, not urging her questions lest there should be pain in the
mere recollection of that horrid vision. He could give no graphic
description of that dream. It was all confusion—a blurred and troubled
picture; but that confusion was in itself agony.

Rarely were his mutterings intelligible; rarely did his wife catch
half-a-dozen consecutive words from those broken sentences; but once
she heard him say,

“The cage—the cage again—iron bars—like a wild beast!”

And now that absent and cloudy look which she had seen in her husband’s
face after the bad dream was there often. She spoke to him sometimes,
and he did not hear. She repeated the same question twice or thrice, in
her soft low voice, standing close beside him, and he did not answer.
There were times when it was difficult to arouse him from that deep
abstraction; and at such times the utter blankness and solitude of her
own life weighed upon her like a dead weight, an almost unbearable
burden.

“What is to become of us both in all the long years before us?” she
thought despairingly. “Are we to be always far apart—living in the same
house, spending all our days together, and yet divided?”

She had married before she was eighteen, and at one-and-thirty was
still in the bloom of womanhood, younger than most women of that age;
for her life had been subject to none of those vicissitudes and fevers
which age women of the world. She had never kept a secret from her
husband, never trembled at opening a milliner’s account, or blushed at
the delivery of a surreptitious letter. The struggles for preëminence,
the social race in which some women waste their energies and strain
their nerves, were unknown to her. She had lived at Enderby Manor as
the flowers lived, rejoicing in the air and the sunshine, drinking
out of a cup of life in which there mingled no drop of poison. Thus
it was that not one line upon the transparent skin marked the passage
of a decade. The violet eyes had the limpid purity, and the emotional
lips had the tender carnation, of girlhood. Mildred Greswold was as
beautiful at thirty-one as Mildred Fausset had been at seventeen.
And yet it seemed to her that life was over, and that her husband had
ceased to care for her.

Many and many an hour in that lovely solitude beside the lake she sat
with hands loosely clasped in her lap or above her head, with her books
lying forgotten at her feet—all the newest books that librarians could
send to tempt the jaded appetite of the reader—and her eyes gazing
vacantly over the blue of the lake or towards the snow-peaks on the
horizon. Often in these silent musings she recalled the past, and
looked at the days that were gone as at a picture.

She remembered just such an autumn as this, a peerless autumn spent
with her father at The Hook—spent for the most part on the river and
in the garden, the sunny days and moonlit nights being far too lovely
for any one to waste indoors. Her seventeenth birthday was not long
past. It was just ten years since she had come home to that house to
find Fay had vanished from it, and to shed bitter tears for the loss
of her companion. Never since that time had she seen Fay’s face. Her
questions had been met coldly or angrily by her mother; and even her
father had answered her with unsatisfactory brevity.

All she could learn was that Fay had been sent to complete her
education at a finishing-school at Brussels.

“At school! O, poor Fay! I hope she is happy.”

“She ought to be,” Mrs. Fausset answered peevishly. “The school is
horridly expensive. I saw one of the bills the other day. Simply
_enormous_. The girls are taken to the opera, and have all sorts of
absurd indulgences.”

“Still, it is only school, mother, not home,” said Mildred
compassionately.

This was two years after Fay had vanished. No letter had ever come
from her to Mildred, though Mildred was able to write now, in her own
sprawling childish fashion, and would have been delighted to answer any
such letter. She had herself indited various epistles to her friend,
but had not succeeded in getting them posted. They had drifted to the
waste-paper basket, mute evidences of wasted affection.

As each holiday time came round the child asked if Fay were coming
home, always to receive the same saddening negative.

One day, when she had been more urgent than usual, Mrs. Fausset lost
temper and answered sharply,

“No, she is not coming. She is never coming. I don’t like her, and I
don’t intend ever to have her in any house of mine, so you may as well
leave off plaguing me about her.”

“But, mother, why don’t you like her?”

“Never mind why. I don’t like her. That is enough for you to know.”

“But, mother, if she is father’s daughter and my sister, you ought to
like her,” pleaded Mildred, very much in earnest.

“How dare you say that! You must never say it again—you are a naughty,
cruel child to say such things!” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, beginning to
cry,

“Why naughty? why cruel? O, mother!” and Mildred cried too.

She clasped her arms round her mother’s neck and sobbed aloud.

“Dear mother, indeed I’m not naughty,” she protested, “but Bell said
Fay was papa’s daughter. ‘Of course she’s his daughter,’ Bell said; and
if she’s father’s daughter, she’s my sister, and it’s wicked not to
love one’s sister. The psalm I was learning yesterday says so, mother.
‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together
in unity!’ And it means sisters just the same, Miss Colville said, when
I asked her; and I do love Fay. I can’t help loving her.”

“You must never speak her name again to me,” said Mrs. Fausset
resolutely. “I shall leave off loving you if you pester me about that
odious girl!”

“Then wasn’t it true what Bell said?”

“Of course not.”

“Mother, would it be wrong for papa to have a daughter?” asked Mildred,
perplexed by this mysterious resentment for which she could understand
no cause,

“Wrong! It would be _infamous_.”

“Would God be angry?” asked the child, with an awe-stricken look.
“Would it be wicked?”

“It would be the worst possible insult to _me_,” said Lord
Castle-Connell’s daughter, ignoring the minor question.

After this Mildred refrained from all further speech about the absent
girl to her mother; but as the years went by she questioned her father
from time to time as to Fay’s whereabouts.

“She is very well off, my dear. You need not make yourself unhappy
about her. She is with a very nice family, and has pleasant
surroundings.”

“Shall I never see her again, father?”

“Never’s a long day, Mildred. I’ll take you to see her by and by when
there is an opportunity. You see, it happens unfortunately that your
mother does not like her, so it is better she should not come here. It
would not be pleasant for her—or for me.”

He said this gravely, with a somewhat dejected look, and Mildred felt
somehow that even to him it would be better to talk no more of her lost
companion.

As the years went by Mrs. Fausset changed from a woman of fashion to a
nervous valetudinarian. It was not that she loved pleasure less, but
her beauty and her health had both begun to dwindle and fade at an age
when other women are in their prime. She fretted at the loss of her
beauty—watched every wrinkle, counted every gray hair, lamented over
every change in the delicate colouring which had been her chief charm.

“How pretty you are growing, Mildred!” she exclaimed once, with a
discontented air, when Mildred was a tall slip of fourteen. “You are
just what I was at your age. And you will grow prettier every day until
you are thirty, and then I daresay you will begin to fade as I have
done, and feel an old woman as I do.”

It seemed to her that her own charms dwindled as her daughter grew.
As the bud unfolded, the flower faded. She felt almost as if Mildred
had robbed her of her beauty. She would not give up the pleasures
and excitement of society. She consulted half-a-dozen fashionable
physicians, and would not obey one of them. They all prescribed the
same repulsive treatment—rest, early hours, country air, with gentle
exercise; no parties, no excitement, no strong tea.

Mrs. Fausset disobeyed them all, and from only fancying herself ill
grew to be really ill; and from chronic lassitude developed organic
disease of the heart.

She lingered nearly two years, a confirmed invalid, suffering a good
deal, and giving other people a great deal of trouble. She died soon
after Mildred’s sixteenth birthday, and on her death-bed she confided
freely in her daughter, who had attended upon her devotedly all through
her illness, neglecting everything else in the world for her mother’s
sake.

“You are old enough to understand things that must once have seemed
very mysterious to you, Mildred,” said Mrs. Fausset, lying half-hidden
in the shadow of guipure bed-curtains, with her daughter’s hand clasped
in hers, perhaps forgetting how young that daughter was in her own
yearning for sympathy. “You couldn’t make out why I disliked that
horrid girl so much, could you?”

“No, indeed, mother.”

“I hated her because she was your father’s daughter, Mildred—his
natural daughter; the child of some woman who was not his wife. You are
old enough now to know what that means. You were reading _The Heart of
Midlothian_ to me last week. You know, Mildred?”

Yes, Mildred knew. She hung her head at the memory of that sad story,
and at the thought that her father might have sinned like George
Staunton.

“Yes, Mildred, she was the child of some woman he loved before he
married me. He must have been desperately in love with the woman, or
he would never have brought her daughter into my house. It was the
greatest insult he could offer to me.”

“Was it, mother?”

“Was it? Why, of course it was. How stupid you are, child!” exclaimed
the invalid peevishly, and the feverish hand grew hotter as she talked.

Mildred blushed crimson at the thought of this story of shame. Poor
Fay! poor, unhappy Fay! And yet her strong common sense told her that
there were two sides to the question.

“It was not Fay’s fault, mother,” she said gently. “No one could blame
Fay, or be angry with _her_. And if the—wicked woman was dead, and
father had repented, and was sorry, was it very wrong for him to bring
my sister home to us?”

“Don’t call her your sister!” exclaimed Mrs. Fausset, with a feeble
scream of angry alarm; “she is not your sister—she is no relation—she
is nothing to you. It was an insult to bring her across my threshold.
You must be very stupid, or you must care very little for _me_, if you
can’t understand that. His conduct proved that he had cared for that
low, common woman—Fay’s mother—more than ever he cared for me; perhaps
he thought her prettier than me,” said the invalid in hysterical
parenthesis, “and I have never known a happy hour since.”

“O, mamma dear, not in all the years when you used to wear such lovely
gowns, and go to so many parties?” protested the voice of common sense.

“I only craved for excitement because I was miserable at heart. I
don’t think you can half understand a wife’s feelings, Mildred, or you
wouldn’t say such foolish things. I wanted you to know this before my
death. I want you to remember it always, and if you meet that odious
girl avoid her as you would a pestilence. If your father should attempt
to bring her here, or to Parchment Street, after I am gone——”

“He will not, mother. He will respect your wishes too much—he will be
too sorry,” exclaimed Mildred, bending down to kiss the hot, dry hand,
and moistening it with her tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

The year of mourning that began soon after this conversation was a very
quiet interval for father and daughter. They travelled a little, spent
six months in Leipsic, where Mildred studied the piano under the most
approved masters, a couple of months in Paris, where her father showed
her all the lions in a tranquil, leisurely way that was very pleasant;
and then they went down to The Hook, and lived there in happy idleness
on the river and in the gardens all through a long and lovely summer.

Both were saddened at the sight of an empty chair—one sacred corner
in all the prettiest rooms—where Maud Fausset had been wont to sit,
a graceful languid figure, robed in white, or some pale delicate
hue even more beautiful than white in contrast with the background
of palms and flowers, Japanese screen or Indian curtain. How pretty
she had looked sitting there, with books and scent-bottles, and
dainty satin-lined basket full of some light frivolous work, which
progressed by stages of half-a-dozen stitches a day! Her fans, her
Tennyson, her palms, and perfumes—all had savoured of her own fragile
bright-coloured loveliness. She was gone; and father and daughter were
alone together—deeply attached to each other, yet with a secret between
them, a secret which made a darkening shadow across the lives of both.

Whenever John Fausset wore a look of troubled thought Mildred fancied
he was brooding upon the past, thinking of that erring woman who had
borne him a child, the child he had tried to fuse into his own family,
and to whom her own childish heart had yearned as to a sister.

“It must have been instinct that made me love her,” she said to
herself; and then she would wonder idly what the fair sinner who had
been Fay’s mother was like, and whether her father had really cared
more for that frail woman than for his lawful wife.

“Poor pretty mamma! he seemed to doat upon her,” thought Mildred. “I
cannot imagine his ever having loved any one so well. I cannot imagine
his ever having cared for any other woman in this world.”

The formless image of that unknown woman haunted the girl’s
imagination. She appeared sometimes with one aspect, sometimes
another—darkly beautiful, of Oriental type, like Scott’s Rebecca, or
fair and lowly-born like Effie Deans—poor fragile Effie, fated to fall
at the first temptation. Poetry and fiction were full of suggestions
about that unknown influence in her father’s life; but every thought
of the past ended in a sigh of pity for that fair wife whose domestic
happiness had been clouded over by that half-discovered mystery.

Never a word did she breathe to her father upon this forbidden subject;
never a word to Bell, who was still at the head of affairs in both Mr.
Fausset’s houses, and who looked like a grim and stony repository of
family secrets.




CHAPTER VIII.

“SUCH THINGS WERE.”


Mildred had been motherless for a year when that new love began to grow
which was to be stronger and closer than the love of mother or father,
and which was to take possession of her life hereafter and transplant
her to a new soil.

How well she remembered that summer afternoon on which she and George
Greswold met for the first time!—she a girl of seventeen, fresh,
simple-minded, untainted by that life of fashion and frivolity which
she had seen only from the outside, looking on as a child at the
follies of men and women—he her senior by thirteen years, and serious
beyond his age. Her father and his father had been companions at
the University, as undergraduates, with full purses and a mutual
delight in fox-hunting and tandem-driving; and it was this old Oxford
friendship which was the cause of George Greswold’s appearance at The
Hook on that particular summer afternoon. Mr. Fausset had met him on
a house-boat at Henley Regatta, had been moved by the memory of the
past on discovering that Greswold was the son of George Ransome of
Magdalen, and had brought his friend’s son home to introduce to his
daughter. It was not altogether without ulterior thought, perhaps,
that he introduced George Greswold into his home. He had a theory that
the young men of this latter day were for the most part a weak-kneed
and degenerate race; and it had seemed to him that this tall,
broad-shouldered young man with the marked features, dark eyes, and
powerful brow was of a stronger type than the average bachelor.

“A pity that he is rather too old for Mildred,” he said to himself,
supposing that his daughter would hardly feel interested in a man who
was more than five-and-twenty.

Mildred could recall his face as she saw it for the first time, to-day
in her desolation, sitting idly beside the lake, while the rhythmical
beat of the paddle-wheels died away in the distance. That grave dark
face impressed her at once with a sense of power. She did not think
the stranger handsome, or fascinating, or aristocratic, or elegant;
but she thought of him a great deal, and she was silent and shy in his
presence, let him come as often as he might.

He was in mourning for his mother, to whom he had been deeply attached,
and who had died within the last three months, leaving him Enderby
Manor and a large fortune. His home life had not been happy. There had
been an antagonism between him and his father from his boyhood upwards,
and he had shaken the dust of the paternal house off his feet, and had
left England to wander aimlessly, living on a small income allowed him
by his mother, and making a little money by literature. He was a second
son, a person of no importance, except to the mother, who doated upon
him.

Happily for this younger son his mother was a woman of fortune, and
on her death George Ransome inherited Enderby Manor, the old house in
which generations of Greswolds had come and gone since Dutch William
was King of England. There had been a much older house pulled down to
make room for that red brick mansion, and the Greswolds had been lords
of the soil since the Wars of the Roses—red-rose to the heart’s core,
and loyal to an unfortunate king, whether Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart.

By the conditions of his mother’s will, George Ransome assumed her
family name and arms, and became George Ransome Greswold in all legal
documents henceforward; but he signed himself George Greswold, and was
known to his friends by that name. He had not loved his father nor his
father’s race.

He came to The Hook often in that glorious summer weather. At the first
he was grave and silent, and seemed oppressed by sad memories; but
this seemed natural in one who had so lately lost a beloved parent.
Gradually the ice melted, and his manner brightened. He came without
being bidden. He contrived to make himself, as it were, a member of the
family, whose appearance surprised nobody. He bought a steam-launch,
which was always at Mr. Fausset’s disposal, and Miss Fausset went
everywhere with her father. She recalled those sunlit days now, with
every impression of the moment; the ever-growing sense of happiness;
the silent delight in knowing herself beloved; the deepening reverence
for the man who loved her; the limitless faith in his power of heart
and brain; the confiding love which felt a protection in the very
sound of his voice. Yes, those had been happy days—the rosy dawning
of a great joy that was to last until the grave, Mildred Fausset had
thought; and now, after thirteen years of wedded love, they had drifted
apart. Sorrow, which should have drawn them nearer together, had served
only to divide them.

“O, my lamb, if you could know in your heavenly home how much your loss
has cost us!” thought the mother, with the image of that beloved child
before her eyes.

There had been a gloomy reserve in George Greswold’s grief which had
held his wife at a distance, and had wounded her sorrowful heart. He
was selfish in his sorrow, forgetting that her loss was as great as
his. He had bowed his head before inexorable Fate, had sat down in dust
and ashes, and brooded over his bereavement, solitary, despairing.
If he did not curse God in his anguish, it was because early teaching
still prevailed, and the habits of thought he had learned in childhood
were not lightly to be flung off. Upon one side of his character he
was a Pagan, seeing in this affliction the hand of Nemesis, the blind
Avenger.

They left Switzerland in the late autumn, and wintered in Vienna, where
Mr. Greswold gave himself up to study, and where neither he nor his
wife took any part in the gaieties of the capital. Here they lived
until the spring, and then, even in the depths of his gloom, a yearning
came upon George Greswold to see the home of his race, the manor which
he had loved as if it were a living thing.

“Mildred, do you think you could bear to be in the old home again?” he
asked his wife suddenly, one morning at breakfast.

“I could bear anything better than the life we lead here,” she
answered, her eyes filling with tears.

“We will go back, then—yes, even if it is only to look upon our
daughter’s grave.”

They went back to England and to Enderby Manor within a week after that
conversation. They arrived at Romsey Station one bright May afternoon,
and found the gray horses waiting to carry them to the old house. How
sad and strange it seemed to be coming home without Lola! She had
always been their companion in such journeys, and her eager face and
glad young voice, on the alert to recognise the first familiar points
of the landscape, hill-top, or tree, or cottage that indicated home,
had given an air of gaiety to every-day life.

The old horses took them back to the Manor, but not the old coachman.
A great change in the household had come about after Lola’s funeral.
George Greswold had been merciless to those servants whose carelessness
had brought about that great calamity, which made seven new graves in
the churchyard before all was done. He dismissed his bailiff, Mrs.
Wadman and her husband, an under-dairymaid and a cowman, and his
housekeeper, all of whom he considered accountable for the use of that
foul water from the old well—accountable, inasmuch as they had given
him no notice of the evil, and had exercised no care or common sense in
their management of the dairy. These he dismissed sternly, and that
party feeling which rules among servants took this severity amiss, and
several other members of the household gave warning.

“Let it be a clean sweep, then,” said Mr. Greswold to Bell, who
announced the falling-away of his old servants. “Let there be none of
the old faces here when we come back next year—except yours. There will
be plenty of time for you to get new people.”

“A clean sweep” suited Bell’s temper admirably. To engage new servants
who should owe their places to her, and bow themselves down before her,
was a delight to the old Irishwoman.

Thus it was that all things had a strange aspect when Mildred Greswold
reëntered her old home. Even the rooms had a different air. The new
servants had arranged the furniture upon new lines, not knowing that
old order which had been a part of daily life.

“Let us go and look at _her_ rooms first,” said Mildred softly; and
husband and wife went silently to the rooms in the south wing—the
octagon-room with its dwarf bookcases and bright bindings, its
proof-engravings after Landseer—pictures chosen by Lola herself. Here
nothing was changed. Bell’s own hands had kept all things in order. No
unfamiliar touch had disturbed the relics of the dead.

Mrs. Greswold stayed in that once happy scene for nearly an hour. It
was hard to realise that she and her daughter were never to be together
again, they who had been almost inseparable—who had sat side by side
by yonder window or yonder hearth in all the changes of the seasons.
There was the piano at which they had played and sung together. The
music-stand still contained the prettily-bound volumes—sonatinas by
Hummel and Clementi—easy duets by Mozart, national melodies, Volks
Lieder. In music the child had been in advance of her years. With the
mother music was a passion, and she had imbued her daughter with her
own tastes in all things. The child’s nature had been a carrying on and
completing of the mother’s character, a development of all the mother’s
gifts.

She was gone, and the mother’s life seemed desolate and empty—the
future a blank. Never in her life had she so much needed her husband’s
love—active, considerate, sympathetic—and yet never had he seemed so
far apart from her. It was not that he was unkind or neglectful, it
was only that his heart made no movement towards hers; he was not in
sympathy with her. He had wrapped himself in his grief as in a mantle;
he stood aloof from her, and seemed never to have understood that her
sorrow was as great as his own.

He left her on the threshold of Lola’s room. It might be that he could
not endure the sight of those things which she had looked at weeping,
in an ecstasy of grief. To her that agony of touch and memory, the
aspect of things that belonged to the past, seemed to bring her lost
child nearer to her—it was as if she stretched her hands across the
gulf and touched those vanished hands.

“Poor piano!” she sighed; “poor piano, that she loved.”

She touched the keys softly, playing the opening bars of _La ci darem
la mano_. It was the first melody they had played together, mother and
child—arranged easily as a duet. Later they had sung it together, the
girl’s voice clear as a bird’s, and seeming to need training no more
than a bird’s voice. These things had been, and were all over.

“What shall I do with my life?” cried the mother despairingly; “what
shall I do with all the days to come—now she is gone?”

She left those rooms at last, locking the doors behind her, and went
out into the garden. The grand old cedars cast their broad shadows on
the lawn. The rustic chairs and tables were there, as in the days gone
by, when that velvet turf under the cedars had been Mrs. Greswold’s
summer parlour. Would she sit there ever again? she wondered: could she
endure to sit there without Lola?

There was a private way from the Manor gardens into the churchyard,
a short cut to church by which mother and daughter had gone twice on
every Sunday ever since Lola was old enough to know what Sunday meant.
She went by this path in the evening stillness to visit Lola’s grave.

She gathered a few rosebuds as she went.

“Flowers for my blighted flower,” she murmured softly.

All was still and solemn in the old churchyard shadowed by sombre
yews—a churchyard of irregular levels and moss-grown monuments enclosed
by rusty iron railings, and humbler headstones of crumbling stone
covered over with an orange-coloured lichen which was like vegetable
rust.

The names on these were for the most part illegible, the lettering of
a fashion that has passed away; but here and there a brand-new stone
perked itself up among these old memorials with an assertive statement
about the dead.

Lola’s grave was marked by a large white marble cross, carved in _alto
relievo_ on the level slab. The inscription was of the simplest:

“Laura, the only child of George and Mildred Greswold, aged twelve.”

There were no words of promise or of consolation upon the stone.

On one side of the grave there was a large mountain-ash, whose white
blossoms and delicate leaves made a kind of temple above the marble
slab; on the other, an ancient yew cast its denser shade. Mildred knelt
down in the shadow, and let her head droop over the cold stone. There
was a skylark singing in the blue vault high above the old Norman
tower—a carol of joy and glad young life, as it seemed to Mildred,
sitting in the dust. What a mockery that joyousness of spring-time and
Nature seemed!

She knew not how long she had knelt there in silent grief when the
branches rustled suddenly, as if a strong arm had parted them,
and a man flung himself down heavily upon a turf-covered mound—a
neglected, nameless grave—beside Lola’s monument. She did not stir
from her kneeling attitude, or lift her head to look at the new-comer,
knowing that the mourner was her husband. She had heard his footsteps
approaching, heavy and slow in the stillness of the place.

The trunk of the tree hid her from that other mourner as she knelt
there. He thought himself alone; and, in the abandonment of that
fancied solitude, he groaned aloud, as Job may have groaned, sitting
among ashes.

“Judgment!” he cried, “judgment!” and then, after an interval of
silence, he cried again, “judgment!”

That one word, so repeated, seemed to freeze all the blood in her
veins. What did it mean, that exceeding bitter cry,

“Judgment!”




CHAPTER IX.

THE FACE IN THE CHURCH.


Two months had gone since that first visit to Lola’s grave, when the
husband and wife had knelt so near each other, and yet so far apart
in the infinite mystery of human consciousness; he with his secret
thoughts and secret woes, which she had never fathomed. He, unaware
of her neighbourhood; she, chilled by a vague suspicion and sense of
estrangement which had been growing upon her ever since her daughter’s
death.

It was summer again, the ripe full-blown summer of mid-July. The awful
anniversary of their bereavement had passed in silence and prayer. All
things at Enderby looked as they had looked in the years that were
gone, except the faces of the servants, which were for the most part
strange. That change of the household made a great change in life to
people so conservative as George Greswold and his wife; and the old
home seemed so much the less like home because of that change. The
Squire of Enderby felt that his popularity was lessened in the village
for which he had done so much. His severe dealing with the offenders
had pleased nobody, not even the sufferers from the epidemic, whose
losses he had avenged. He had shown himself implacable; and there were
many who said he had been unjust.

“It was hard upon Wadman and his wife to be turned off after twenty
years’ faithful service,” said one of the villagers. “The Squire may go
a long way before he’ll get as good a bailiff as Thomas,” said another.

For the first time since he had inherited the estate George Greswold
felt himself surrounded by an atmosphere of discontent, and even
dislike. His tenants seemed afraid of him, and were reticent and moody
when he talked to them, which he did much seldomer than of old, making
a great effort in order to appear interested in their affairs.

Mildred’s life during those summer weeks, while the roses were
opening and all the flowers succeeding each other in a procession of
loveliness, had drifted along like a slow dull stream that crawls
through a desolate swamp. There was neither beauty nor colour in her
existence; there was a sense of vacuity, an aching void. Nothing to
hope for, nothing to look back upon.

She did not abandon herself slavishly to her sorrow. She tried to
resume the life of duty which had once been so full of sweetness,
so rich in its rewards for every service. She went about among the
cottagers as of old; she visited the shabby gentilities on the fringe
of the market town, the annuitants and struggling families, the poor
widows and elderly spinsters, who had quite as much need of help as
the cottagers, and whom it had always been her delight to encourage
and sustain with friendliness and sympathy, as well as with delicate
benefactions, gifts that never humiliated the recipient. She took up
the thread of her work in the parish schools; she resumed her old
interest in the church services and decorations, in the inevitable
charity bazaar or organ-fund concert. She played her part in the parish
so well that people began to say,

“Mrs. Greswold is getting over her loss.”

In him the shock had left a deeper mark. His whole aspect was changed.
He looked ten years older than before the coming of sorrow; and though
people loved her better, they pitied him more.

“She has more occupations and pursuits to interest her,” said Mr.
Rollinson, the curate. “She is devoted to music, and that employs her
mind.”

Yes, music was her passion; but in these days of mourning even music
was allied to pain. Every melody she played, every song she sang,
recalled the child whose appreciation of that divine art had been far
beyond her years. They had sung and played together. Often singing
alone in the summer dusk, in that corner of the long drawing-room,
where Lola’s babyish chair still stood, she had started, fancying she
heard that other voice mingling with her own—the sweet clear tones
which had sounded seraphic even upon earth.

O, was she with the angels now; or was it all a fable, that fond vision
of a fairer world and an angelic choir, singing before the great white
throne? To have lost such a child was almost to believe in the world
of seraphim and cherubim, of angels and purified spirits. Where else
could she be?

Husband and wife lived together, side by side, in a sad communion that
seemed to lack the spirit of unity. The outward semblance of confiding
affection was there, but there was something wanting. He was very good
to her—as kind, as attentive, and considerate as in their first year of
marriage; and yet there was something wanting.

She remembered what he had been when he came as a stranger to The Hook;
and it seemed to her as if the glass of Time had been turned backwards
for fourteen years, and that he was again just as he had been in those
early days, when she had watched him, curiously interested in his
character as in a mystery. He was too grave for a man of his years—and
with a shade of gloom upon him that hinted at a more than common grief.
He had been subject to lapses of abstraction, as if his mind had
slipped back to some unhappy past. It was only when he had fallen in
love and was wholly devoted to her that the shadow passed away, and he
began to feel the joyousness of life and the fervour of ardent hopes.
Then the old character dropped off him like the serpent’s slough, and
he became as young as the youngest—boyish even in his frank felicity.

This memory of her first impressions about him was so strong with her
that she could not help speaking of it one evening after dinner when
she had been playing one of Beethoven’s grandest adagios to him, and
they were sitting in silence, she by the piano, he far away by an open
window on a level with the shadowy lawn, where the great cedars rose
black against the pale gray sky.

“George, do you remember my playing that adagio to you for the first
time?”

“I remember you better than Beethoven. I could scarcely think of the
music in those days for thinking so much of you.”

“Ah, but the first time you heard me play that adagio was before you
had begun to care for me—before you had cast your slough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Before you had come out of your cloud of sad memories. When first you
came to us you lived only in the past. I doubt if you were more than
half-conscious of our existence.”

She could only distinguish his profile faintly defined against the
evening gray as he sat beside the window. Had she seen the expression
of his face, its look of infinite pain, she would hardly have pursued
the subject.

“I had but lately lost my mother,” he said gravely.

“Ah, but that was a grief which you did not hide from us. You did not
shrink from our sympathy there. There was some other trouble, something
that belonged to a remoter past, over which you brooded in secret. Yes,
George, I know you had some secrets then—that divided us—and—and—”
falteringly, with tears in her voice—“I think those old secrets are
keeping us asunder now, when our grief should draw us nearer together.”

She had left her place by the piano, and had gone to him as she spoke,
and now she was on her knees beside him, clinging to him tearfully.

“George, trust me, love me,” she pleaded.

“My beloved, do I not love you?” he protested passionately, clasping
her in his arms, kissing away her tears, soothing her as if she had
been a child. “My dearest and best, from the first hour I awakened to
a new life in your love my truth has never wavered, my heart has never
known change.”

“And yet you are changed—since our darling went—terribly changed.”

“Do you wonder that I grieve for her?”

“No, but you grieve apart—you hold yourself aloof from me.”

“If I do it is because I do not want you to share my burden, Mildred.
Your sorrow may be cured, perhaps—mine never can be. Time may be
merciful to you—for me time can do nothing.”

“Dearest, what hope can there be for me that you do not share?—the
Christian’s hope of meeting our loved one hereafter. I have no other
hope.”

“I hardly know if I have that hope,” he answered slowly, with deepest
despondency.

“And yet you are a Christian.”

“If to endeavour to follow Christ, the Teacher and Friend of humanity,
is to be a Christian—yes.”

“And you believe in the world to come?”

“I try so to believe, Mildred. I try. Faith in the Kingdom of Heaven
does not come easily to a man whose life has been ruled by the
inexorable Fates. Not a word, darling; let us not talk of these things.
We know no more than Socrates knew in his dungeon; no more than Roger
Bacon knew in his old age—unheard, buried, forgotten. Never doubt my
love, dearest. That is changeless. You and Lola were the sunshine of
my life. You shall be my sunshine henceforward. I have been selfish in
brooding over my sorrow; but it is the habit of my mind to grieve in
silence. Forgive me, dear wife; forgive me.”

He clasped her in his arms, and again she felt assured of her husband’s
affection; but she knew all the same that there was some sorrow in his
past life which he had kept hidden from her, which he meant her never
to know.

Many a time in their happy married life she had tried to lead him to
talk of his boyhood and youth. About his days at Eton and Oxford he was
frank enough, but he was curiously reticent about his home life and
about those years which he had spent travelling over the Continent
after he had left his father’s house for good.

“I was not happy at home, Mildred,” he told her one day. “My father
and I did not get on together, as the phrase goes. He was very fond of
my elder brother. They had the same way of thinking about most things.
Randolph’s marriage pleased my father, and he looked to Randolph to
strengthen the position of our family, which had been considerably
reduced by his own extravagance. He would have liked my mother’s estate
to have gone to the elder son; but she had full disposing power, and
she made me her heir. This set my father against me, and there came a
time when, dearly as I loved my mother, I found that I could no longer
live at home. I went out into the world, a lonely man; and I only came
back to the old home after my father’s death.”

This was the fullest account of his family history that George Greswold
had given his wife. From his reserve in speaking of his father she
divined that the balance of wrong had been upon the side of the parent
rather than of the son. Had a man of her husband’s temper been the
sinner he would have frankly confessed his errors. Of his mother he
spoke with undeviating love; and he seemed to have been on friendly
terms with his brother.

On the morning after that tearful talk in the twilight Mr. Greswold
startled his wife from a pensive reverie as they sat at breakfast
in the garden. They always breakfasted out of doors on fine summer
mornings. They had made no change in old customs since their return,
as some mourners might have done, hoping to blunt the keen edge of
memory by an alteration in the details of life. Both knew too well
how futile any such alteration of their surroundings would be. They
remembered Lola no more vividly at Enderby than they had remembered her
in Switzerland.

“My dearest, I have been thinking of you incessantly since last night,
and of the loneliness of your life,” George Greswold began seriously,
as he sat in a low basket-chair, sipping his coffee, with his favourite
setter Kassandra at his feet; an Irish dog that had been famous for
feather in days gone by, but who had insinuated herself into the family
affections, and had got herself accepted as a household companion to
the ruin of her sporting qualities. Kassandra went no more with the
guns. Her place was the drawing-room or the lawn.

“I can never be lonely, George, while I have you. There is no other
company I can ever care about henceforward.”

“Let me always be the first, dear; but you should have female
companionship of some kind. Our house is empty and voiceless. There
should be some young voice—some young footstep—”

“Do you mean that I ought to hire a girl to run up and down stairs,
and laugh in the corridors, as Lola used? O, George, how can you!”
exclaimed Mildred, beginning to cry.

“No, no, dear. I had no such thought in my mind. I was thinking of
Randolph’s daughter. You seemed to like her when she and her sister
were here two years ago.”

“Yes, she was a nice, bright girl then, and my darling was pleased with
her. How merry they were together, playing battledore and shuttlecock
over there by the yew hedge! Don’t ask me ever to see that girl again,
George. It would make my heart ache.”

“I am sorry to hear you say that, Mildred. I was going to ask you to
have her here on a good long visit. Now that Rosalind is married,
Pamela has no home of her own. Rosalind and her husband like having
her occasionally—for a month or six weeks at a time; but Sir Henry
Mountford’s house is not Pamela’s home. She would soon begin to feel
herself an incubus. The Mountfords are very fond of society, and just
a little worldly. They would soon be tired of a girl whose presence
was no direct advantage. I have been thinking that with us Pamela
would never be in the way. You need not see too much of her in this
big house. There would be plenty of room for her to carry on her own
pursuits and amusements without boring you; and when you wanted her she
would be at hand, a bright companionable girl, who would grow fonder of
you every day.”

“I could not endure her fondness. I could not endure any girl’s
companionship. Her presence would only remind me of my loss.”

“Dearest, I thought we were both agreed that, as nothing can make us
forget our darling, it cannot matter to us how often we are reminded of
her.”

“Yes, by silent, unreasoning things like Kassandra,” touching the dog’s
tawny head with a caressing hand; “or the garden—the trees and flowers
she loved—her books—her piano. Those things may remind us of our
darling without hurting us. But to hear a girl’s voice calling me—as
she used to call me from the garden on summer mornings—to hear a girl’s
laughter——”

“Yes, it would be painful, love, at first. I can understand that,
Mildred. But if you can benefit an orphan girl by having her here, I
know your kind heart will not refuse. Let her come for a few weeks,
and if her presence pains you she shall stay no longer. She shall not
be invited again. I would not ask you to receive a stranger, but my
brother’s daughter is near me in blood.”

“Let her come, George,” said Mildred impulsively; “I am very
selfish—thinking only of my own feelings. Let her come. How strangely
this talk of ours reminds me of something that happened when I was a
child!”

“What was that, Mildred?”

“You have heard me speak of Fay, my playfellow?”

“Yes.”

“I remember the evening my father asked mamma to let her come to us. It
seemed just now as if you were using his very words; and yet all things
were different.”

Mildred had told him very little about that childish sorrow of hers.
She had shrunk from any allusion to the girl whose existence bore
witness against her father. She, too, fond and frank as she was, had
kept her own counsel, had borne the burden of a secret.

“Yes, I have heard you speak of the girl you called Fay, and of whom
you must have been very fond, for the tears came into your eyes when
you mentioned her. Did she live with you long?”

“O, no, a very short time! She was sent to school—to a finishing-school
at Brussels.”

“Brussels!” he repeated, with a look of surprise.

“Yes. Do you know anything about Brussels schools?”

“Nothing personally. I have heard of girls educated there. And what
became of your playfellow after the Brussels school?”

“I never heard.”

“And you never tried to find out?”

“Yes, I asked my mother; but there was a prejudice in her mind against
poor Fay. I would rather not talk about her, George.”

Her vivid blush, her evident confusion, perplexed her husband. There
was some kind of mystery, it seemed—some family trouble in the
background, or Mildred, who was all candour, would have spoken more
freely.

“Then may I really invite Pamela?” he asked, after a brief silence,
during which he had responded to the endearments of Kassandra, too well
fed to have any design upon the dainties on the breakfast-table, and
only asking to be loved.

“I will write to her myself, George. Where is she?”

“Not very far off. She is at Cowes with the Mountfords, on board
Sir Henry’s yacht the Gadfly. You had better send your letter to the
post-office, marked Gadfly.”

The invitation was despatched by the first post; Miss Greswold was
asked to come to the Manor as soon as she liked, and to stay till the
autumn.

The next day was Sunday, and Mr. and Mrs. Greswold went to church
together by the path that led them within a few paces of Lola’s grave.

For the first time since her daughter’s death Mildred had put on a
light gown. Till to-day she had worn only black. This morning she came
into the vivid sunlight in a pale gray gown of soft lustreless silk,
and a neat little gray straw bonnet, which set off the fairness of
her skin and the sheen of her golden hair. The simple fashion of her
gown became her tall, slim figure, which had lost none of the grace of
girlhood. She was the prettiest and most distinguished-looking woman in
Enderby Church, although there were more county families represented
there upon that particular Sunday than are often to be seen in a
village church.

The Manor House pew was on one side of the chancel, and commanded a
full view of the nave. The first lesson was long, and while it was
being read Mildred’s eyes wandered idly along the faces in the nave,
recognising countenances that had been familiar to her ever since her
marriage, until that wandering gaze stopped suddenly, arrested by a
face that was strange.

She saw this strange face between other faces—as it were in a cleft
in the block of people. She saw it at the end of a vista, with the
sunlight from the chancel window full upon it—a face that impressed her
as no face of a stranger had ever done before.

It looked like the face of Judas, she thought; and then in the next
moment was ashamed of her fancy.

“It is only the colouring, and the effect of the light upon it,” she
told herself. “I am not so weak as to cherish the vulgar prejudice
against that coloured hair.”

“That coloured hair” was of the colour which a man’s enemies call red
and his friends auburn or chestnut. It was of that ruddy brown which
Titian has immortalised in more than one Venus, and without which
Potiphar’s wife would be a nonentity.

The stranger wore a small pointed beard of this famous colouring.
His eyes were of a reddish brown, large, and luminous, his eyebrows
strongly arched; his nose was a small aquiline; his brow was wide
and lofty, slightly bald in front. His mouth was the only obviously
objectionable feature. The lips were finely moulded, from a Greek
sculptor’s standpoint, and would have done for a Greek Bacchus, but the
expression was at once crafty and sensual. The auburn moustache served
to accentuate rather than to conceal that repellant expression. Mildred
looked at him presently as he stood up for the _Te Deum_.

He was tall, for she saw his head well above intervening heads. He
looked about five-and-thirty. He had the air of being a gentleman.

“Whoever he is, I hope I shall never see him again,” thought Mildred.




CHAPTER X.

THERE IS ALWAYS THE SKELETON.


When Mr. and Mrs. Greswold left the church, the stranger was taking his
place in the Hillersdon wagonette, a capacious vehicle, drawn by a pair
of upstanding black-brown horses, set off by servants in smart liveries
of dark brown and gold.

Mildred gave a sigh of relief. If the stranger was a visitor
at Riverdale it was not likely that he would stay long in the
neighbourhood, or be seen again for years to come. The guests at
Riverdale were generally birds of passage; and the same faces seldom
appeared there twice. Mr. and Mrs. Hillersdon of Riverdale were famous
for their extensive circle, and famous for bringing new people into the
county. Some of their neighbours said it was Mr. Hillersdon who brought
the people there, and that Mrs. Hillersdon had nothing to do with the
visiting list; others declared that husband and wife were equally
fickle and equally frivolous.

Riverdale was one of the finest houses within ten miles of Romsey,
and it was variously described by the local gentry. It was called a
delightful house, or it was called a curious house, according to the
temper of the speaker. Its worst enemy could not deny that it was
a splendid house—spacious, architectural, luxurious, with all the
appendages of wealth and dignity—nor could its worst enemy deny its
merit as one of the most hospitable houses in the county.

Notwithstanding this splendour and lavish hospitality, the local
magnates did not go to Riverdale, and the Hillersdons were not received
in some of the best houses. Tom Hillersdon was a large landowner,
a millionaire, and a man of good family; but Tom Hillersdon was
considered to have stranded himself in middle life by a marriage
which in the outer world was spoken of vaguely as “unfortunate,” but
which the straitlaced among his neighbours considered fatal. No man
who had so married could hold up his head among his friends any more;
no man who had so married could hope to have his wife received in
decent people’s houses. In spite of which opinion prevailing among
Tom Hillersdon’s oldest friends Mrs. Hillersdon contrived to gather a
good many people round her, and some of them the most distinguished
in the land. She had Cabinet Ministers, men of letters, and famous
painters among her guests. She had plenty of women friends—of a sort:
attractive women, intellectual and enlightened women; sober matrons,
bread-and-butter girls; women who doated on Mrs. Hillersdon, and,
strange to say, had never heard her history.

And yet Hillersdon’s wife had a history scarcely less famous than
that of Cleopatra or Nell Gwynne. Louise Hillersdon was once Louise
Lorraine, the young adventuress whose Irish gray eyes had set all
London talking when the Great Exhibition of ’62 was still a monstrous
iron skeleton, and when South Kensington was in its infancy. Louise
Lorraine’s extravagance, and Louise Lorraine’s devotees, from German
princes and English dukes downwards, had been town-talk. Her box at the
opera had been the cynosure of every eye; and Paris ran mad when she
drove in the Bois, or exhibited her diamonds in the Rue Lepelletier;
or supped in the small hours at the Café de Paris, with the topmost
strawberries in the basket. Numerous and conflicting were the versions
of her early history—the more sensational chronicles describing her
as the Aphrodite of the gutter. Some people declared that she could
neither read nor write, and could not stir without her amanuensis at
her elbow; others affirmed that she spoke four languages, and read
a Greek play or a chapter of Thucidydes every night, with her feet
on the fender, while her maid brushed her hair. The sober truth lay
midway between these extremes. She was the daughter of a doctor in a
line regiment; she was eminently beautiful, very ignorant, and very
clever. She wrote an uneducated hand, never read anything better than
a sentimental novel, sang prettily, and could accompany her songs on
the guitar with a good deal of dash and fire. To this may be added that
she was an adept in the art of dress, had as much tact and finesse as
a leader of the old French noblesse, and more audacity than a Parisian
cocotte in the golden age of Cocotterie. Such she was when Tom
Hillersdon, Wiltshire squire, and millionaire, swooped like an eagle
upon this fair dove, and bore her off to his eerie. There was howling
and gnashing of teeth among those many admirers who were all thinking
seriously about making the lovely Louise a _bonâ fide_ offer; and it
was felt in a certain set that Tom Hillersdon had done a valiant and
victorious deed; but his country friends were of one accord in the idea
that Hillersdon had wrecked himself for ever.

The Squire’s wife came to Riverdale, and established herself there
with as easy an air as if she had been a duchess. She gave herself
no trouble about the county families. London was near enough for the
fair Louise, and she filled her house—or Tom Hillersdon filled it—with
relays of visitors from the great city. Scarcely had she been settled
there a week when the local gentry were startled at seeing her sail
into church with one of the most famous English statesmen in her
train. Upon the Sunday after she was attended by a great painter and
a well-known savant; and besides these she had a pew full of smaller
fry—a lady novelist, a fashionable actor, a celebrated Queen’s
Counsel, and a county member.

“Where does she get those men?” asked Lady Marjorie Danefeld, the
Conservative member’s wife; “surely they can’t _all_ be—reminiscences.”

It had been supposed while the newly-wedded couple were on their
honeymoon that the lady’s arrival at Riverdale would inaugurate a reign
of profanity—that Sunday would be given over to Bohemian society,
café-chantant songs, champagne, and cigarette-smoking. Great was the
surprise of the locality, therefore, when Mrs. Hillersdon appeared in
the Squire’s pew on Sunday morning, neatly dressed, demure, nay, with
an aspect of more than usual sanctity; greater still the astonishment
when she reappeared in the afternoon, and listened meekly to the
catechising of the school-children and to the baptism of a refractory
baby; greater even yet when it was found that these pious practices
were continued, that she never missed a Saint’s-Day service, that
she had morning prayers for family and household, and that she held
meetings of an evangelical character in her drawing-room—meetings at
which curates from outlying parishes gathered like a flock of crows,
and at which the excellence of the tea and coffee, pound-cake and
muffins, speedily became known to the outside world.

Happily for Tom Hillersdon these pious tendencies did not interfere
with his amusements or the pleasantness of his domestic life. Riverdale
was enlivened by a perennial supply of lively or interesting people.
Notoriety of some kind was a passport to the Hillersdons’ favour. It
was an indication that a man was beginning to make his mark when he
was asked to Riverdale. When he had made his mark he might think twice
about going. Riverdale was the paradise of budding celebrities.

So to-day, seeing the stranger get into the Hillersdon wagonette, Mrs.
Greswold opined that he was a man who had made some kind of reputation.
He could not be an actor with that beard. He was a painter, perhaps.
She thought he looked like a painter.

The wagonette was full of well-dressed women and well-bred men,
all with an essentially metropolitan—or cosmopolitan—air. The
eighteen-carat stamp of “county” was obviously deficient. Mrs.
Hillersdon had her own carriage—a barouche—which she shared with an
elderly lady, who looked as correct as if she had been a bishop’s wife.
She was on bowing terms with Mrs. Greswold. They had met at hunt-balls
and charity bazaars, and at various other functions from which the wife
of a local landowner can hardly be excluded—even when she has a history.

Mildred thought no more of the auburn-haired stranger after the
wagonette had disappeared in a cloud of summer-dust. She strolled
slowly home with her husband by a walk which they had been in the habit
of taking on fine Sundays after morning service, but which they had
never trodden together since Lola’s death. It was a round which skirted
the common, and took them past a good many of the cottages, and their
tenants had been wont to loiter at their gates on fine Sundays, in the
hope of getting a passing word with the Squire and his wife. There
had been something patriarchal, or clannish, in the feeling between
landlord and tenant, labourer and master, which can only prevail in a
parish where the chief landowner spends the greater part of his life
at home.

To-day every one was just as respectful as of old; curtsies were as low
and tones as reverential; but George Greswold and his wife felt there
was a difference, all the same. A gulf had been cleft between them and
their people by last summer’s calamity. It was not the kindred of the
dead in whom this coolness was distinguishable. The bereaved seemed
drawn nearer to their Squire by an affliction which had touched him
too. But in Enderby parish there was a bond of kindred which seemed to
interlink the whole population. There were not above three family names
in the village, and everybody was everybody else’s cousin, when not
a nearer relative. Thus, in dismissing his bailiff and dairy people,
Mr. Greswold had given umbrage to almost all his cottagers. He was no
longer regarded as a kind master. A man who could dismiss a servant
after twenty years’ faithful service was, in the estimation of Enderby
parish, a ruthless tyrant—a master whose yoke galled every shoulder.

“Him seemed to be so fond of we all,” said Luke Thomas, the village
wheelwright, brother of that John Thomas who had been Mr. Greswold’s
bailiff, and who was now dreeing his weird in Canada; “and yet offend
he, and him can turn and sack yer as if yer was a thief—sweep yer off
his premises like a handful o’ rubbish. Faithful service don’t count
with he.”

George Greswold felt the change from friendly gladness to cold
civility. He could see the altered expression in all those familiar
faces. The only sign of affection was from Mrs. Rainbow, standing at
her cottage gate in decent black, with sunken cheeks worn pale by many
tears. She burst out crying at sight of Mildred Greswold, and clasped
her hand in a fervour of sympathy.

“O, to think of your sweet young lady, ma’am! that you should
lose her, as I lost my Polly!” she sobbed; and the two women wept
together—sisters in affliction.

“You don’t think we are to blame, do you, Mrs. Rainbow?” Mildred said
gently.

“No, no, indeed, ma’am. We all know it was God’s will. We must kiss the
rod.”

“What fatalists these people are!” said Greswold, as he and his wife
walked homeward by the sweet-smelling common, where the heather showed
purple here and there, and where the harebells were beginning to dance
upon the wind. “Yes, it is God’s will; but the name of that God is
Nemesis.”

Husband and wife were almost silent during luncheon. Both were
depressed by that want of friendliness in those who had been to them as
familiar friends. To have forfeited confidence and affection was hard
when they had done so much to merit both. Mildred could but remember
how she and her golden-haired daughter had gone about amongst those
people, caring for all their needs, spiritual and temporal, never
approaching them from the standpoint of superiority, but treating
them verily as friends. She recalled long autumn afternoons in the
village reading-room, when she and Lola had presided over a bevy
of matrons and elderly spinsters, she reading aloud to them while
they worked, Lola threading needles to save elderly eyes, sewing
on buttons, indefatigable in giving help of all kinds to those
village sempstresses. She had fancied that those mothers’ meetings,
the story-books, and the talk had brought them all into a bond of
affectionate sympathy; and yet one act of stern justice seemed to have
cancelled all obligations.

Mr. Greswold lighted a cigar after lunch, and went for a ramble in
those extensive copses which were one of the charms of Enderby Manor,
miles and miles of woodland walks, dark and cool in the hottest day of
summer—lonely footpaths where the master of Enderby could think his own
thoughts without risk of coming face to face with any one in that leafy
solitude. The Enderby copses were cherished rather for pleasure than
for profit, and were allowed to grow a good deal higher and a good deal
wilder and thicker than the young wood upon neighbouring estates.

Mildred went to the drawing-room and to her piano, after her husband
her chief companion and confidante now that Lola was gone. Music was
her passion—the only art that moved her deeply, and to sit alone
wandering from number to number of Beethoven and Mozart, Bach or
Mendelssohn, was the very luxury of loneliness.

Adhering in all things to the rule that Sunday was not as other days,
she had her library of sacred music apart from other volumes, and it
was sacred music only which she played on Sundays. Her _répertoire_ was
large, and she roamed at will among the classic masters of the last two
hundred years, but for sacred music Bach and Mozart were her favourites.

She was playing a Gloria by the latter composer when she heard a
carriage drive past the windows, and looked up just in time to catch
a glimpse of a profile that startled her with a sudden sense of
strangeness and familiarity. The carriage was a light T-cart, driven by
a groom in the Hillersdon livery.

A visitor from Riverdale was a novelty, for, although George Greswold
and Tom Hillersdon were friendly in the hunting-field, Riverdale and
the Manor were not on visiting terms. The visit was for her husband,
Mildred concluded, and she went on playing.

The door was opened by the new footman, who announced “Mr. Castellani.”

Mrs. Greswold rose from the piano to find herself face to face with
the man whose countenance, seen in the distance, in the light of the
east window, had reminded her of Judas. Seen as she saw him now, in the
softer light of the afternoon, standing before her with a deprecating
air in her own drawing-room, the stranger looked altogether different,
and she thought he had a pleasing expression.

He was tall and slim, well dressed in a subdued metropolitan style;
and he had an air of distinction and elegance which would have marked
him anywhere as a creature apart from the common herd. It was not
an English manner. There was a supple grace in his movements which
suggested a Southern origin. There was a pleading look in the full
brown eyes which suggested an emotional temperament.

“An Italian, no doubt,” thought Mildred, taking this Southern
gracefulness in conjunction with the Southern name.

She wondered on what pretence this stranger had called, and what could
be his motive for coming.

“Mrs. Greswold, I have to apologise humbly for presenting myself
without having first sent you my credentials and waited for your
permission to call,” he said, in very perfect English, with only the
slightest Milanese accent; and then he handed Mrs. Greswold an unsealed
letter, which he had taken from his breast-pocket.

She glanced at it hastily, not a little embarrassed by the situation.
The letter was from an intimate friend, an amateur _littérateur_, who
wrote graceful sonnets and gave pleasant parties:

 “I need not excuse myself, my dear friend, for making Mr. Castellani
 known to you in the flesh, as I have no doubt he is already familiar
 to you in the spirit. He is the anonymous author of _Nepenthe_, the
 book that _almost every one_ has been reading and _quite every one_
 has been talking about this season. Only the few can _understand_ it;
 but you are of those few, and I feel assured your _deepest_ feelings
 have been stirred by that _most exceptional_ work. How delicious it
 must be with you among green lanes and English meadows! We are just
 rushing off to a land of extinct volcanoes for my poor husband’s
 annual cure. _A vous de cœur_,

  DIANA TOMKISON.”

“Pray sit down,” said Mildred, as she finished her gushing friend’s
note; “my husband will be in presently—I hope in time to see you.”

“Pardon me if, in all humility, I say it is _you_ I was especially
anxious to see, to know, if it were possible—delightful as it will
be also to know Mr. Greswold. It is with your name that my past
associations are interwoven.”

“Indeed! How is that?”

“It is a long story, Mrs. Greswold. To explain the association I must
refer to the remote past. My grandfather was in the silk trade, like
your grandfather.”

Mildred blushed; the assertion came upon her like an unpleasant
surprise. It was a shock. That great house of silk merchants from which
her father’s wealth had been derived had hardly ever been mentioned in
her presence. Lord Castle-Connell’s daughter had never grown out of the
idea that all trade is odious, and _her_ daughter had almost forgotten
that her father had ever been in trade.

“Yes, when the house of Fausset was in its infancy the house of Felix &
Sons, silk manufacturers and silk merchants, was one of the largest on
the hillside of old Lyons. My great-grandfather was one of the richest
men in Lyons, and he was able to help the clever young Englishman, your
grandfather, who came into his house as corresponding clerk, to perfect
himself in the French language, and to find out what the silk trade
was like. He had a small capital, and when he had learnt something
about the trade, he established himself near St. Paul’s Churchyard as
a wholesale trader in a very small way. He had no looms of his own in
those days; and it was the great house of Felix, and the credit given
him by that house, which enabled him to hold his own, and to make a
fortune. When your father began life the house of Felix was on the
wane. Your grandfather had established a manufactory of his own at
Lyons. Felix & Sons had grown old-fashioned. They had forgotten to
march with the times. They had allowed themselves to go to sleep; and
they were on the verge of bankruptcy when your father came to their
rescue with a loan which enabled them to tide over their difficulties.
They had had a lesson, and they profited by it. The house of Felix
recovered its ascendency, and the loan was repaid before your father
retired from business.”

“I am not surprised to hear that my father was generous. I should have
been slow to believe that he could have been ungrateful,” said Mildred
softly.

“Your name is among my earliest recollections,” pursued Castellani.
“My mother was educated at a convent at Roehampton, and she was very
fond of England and English people. The first journey I can distinctly
remember was a journey to London, which occurred when I was ten years
old. I remember my father and mother talking about Mr. Fausset. She had
known him when she was a little girl. He used to stay in her father’s
house when he came to Lyons on business. She would like to have seen
him and his wife and daughter, for old times’ sake; but she had been
told that his wife was a lady of rank, and that he had broken off all
associations with his trading career. She was too diffident to intrude
herself upon her father’s old ally. One day our carriage passed yours
in the Park. Yes, I saw you, a golden-haired child—yes, madam, saw you
with these eyes—and the vision has stayed with me, a sunny remembrance
of my own childhood. I can see that fair child’s face in this room
to-day.”

“You should have seen my daughter,” faltered Mildred sadly.

“You have a daughter?” said the stranger eagerly.

“I _had_ a daughter. She is gone. I only put off my black gown
yesterday; but my heart and mind will wear mourning for her till I go
to my grave.”

“Ah, madam, how deeply I sympathise with such a grief!” murmured
Castellani.

He had a voice of peculiar depth and beauty—one of those rare voices
whose every tone is music. The pathos and compassion in those few
commonplace words moved Mildred to sudden tears. She commanded herself
with an effort.

“I am much interested in your reminiscences,” she said, after a brief
pause. “My father was very dear to me. My mother came of an old Irish
family, and the Irish, as you know, are apt to be over-proud of high
birth. I had never heard my father’s commercial life spoken about until
to-day. I only knew him as an idle man, without business cares of any
kind, able to take life pleasantly. He used to spend two or three
months of every year under this roof. It was a terrible blow to me when
we lost him six years ago, and I think my husband mourned him almost as
deeply as I did. But tell me about your book. Are you really the author
of _Nepenthe_, that nameless author who has been so much discussed?”

“And who has been identified with so many distinguished people—Mr.
Gladstone—Cardinal Newman.”

“Mr. Swinburne—Mr. Browning. I have heard all kinds of speculations.
And is it really you?”

“Yes, it is I. To you I may plead guilty, since, unfortunately, the
authorship of _Nepenthe_ is now _le secret de Polichinelle_.”

“It is a—strange book,” said Mildred. “My husband and I were both
interested in it, and impressed by it. But your book saddened us both.
You seem to believe in nothing.”

“‘Seems,’ madam! nay, I know not ‘seems;’ but perhaps I am not so
bad as you think me. I am of Hamlet’s temper—inquiring rather than
disbelieving. To live is to doubt. And I own that I have seen enough of
this life to discover that the richest gift Fate can give to man is the
gift of forgetfulness.”

“I cannot think that. I would not forget, even if I could. It would be
treason to forget the beloved ones we have lost.”

“Ah, Mrs. Greswold, most men have worse memories than the memory of the
dead. The wounds we want healed are deeper than those made by Death;
his scars we can afford to look upon. There are wounds that have gone
deeper, and that leave an uglier mark.”

There was a pause. Mr. Castellani made no sign of departure. He
evidently intended to wait for the Squire’s return. Through the open
windows of a second drawing-room, divided from the first by an
archway, they could see the servants setting out the tea-table on
the lawn. A Turkey carpet was spread under the cedar, and there were
basket-chairs of various shapes, cushioned, luxurious, and two or
three small wicker-tables of different colours, and a milking-stool or
two, and all the indications of out-door life. The one thing missing
was that aerial figure, robed in white, which had been wont to flit
about among the dancing shadows of branch and blossom—a creature as
evanescent as they, it seemed to that mourning mother who remembered
her to-day.

“Are you staying long at Riverdale?” asked Mildred presently, by way of
conversation.

“If Mrs. Hillersdon would be good enough to have me, I would stay
another fortnight. The place is perfect, the surrounding scenery has
your true English charm, and my hostess is simply delightful.”

“You like her?” asked Mildred, interested.

No woman can help being curious about a woman with such a history as
Mrs. Hillersdon’s. All the elements of romance and mystery seem,
from the feminine standpoint, to concentre in such a career. How
many hearts has such a woman broken; how many lives has she ruined;
how often has she been on the brink of madness or suicide?—she, the
placid matron, with her fat carriage-horses, and powdered footmen,
and big prayer-book, and demure behaviour, and altogether bourgeois
surroundings.

“Like her? Yes; she is such a clever woman.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, she is a marvel—the cleverest woman I know.”

He laid a stress on the superlative. His praise might mean
anything—might be a hidden sneer. He might praise as the devil
prays—backwards. Mildred had an uncomfortable feeling that he was not
in earnest.

“Have you known her long?” she asked.

“Not very long; only this season. I am told that she is fickle, or that
other people are fickle, and that she seldom knows any one more than a
season. But I do not mean to be fickle; I mean to be a house-friend at
Riverdale all my life if she will let me. She is a very clever woman,
and thoroughly artistic.”

Mildred had not quite grasped the modern significance of this last word.

“Does Mrs. Hillersdon paint?” she asked.

“No, she does not paint.”

“She plays—or sings, I suppose?”

“No. I am told she once sang Spanish ballads with a guitar
accompaniment; but the people who remember her singing tell me that her
arms were the chief feature in the performance. Her arms are lovely
to this day. No; she neither paints, nor plays, nor sings; but she is
supremely artistic. She dresses as few women of five-and-forty know
how to dress—dresses so as to make one think five-and-forty the most
perfect age for a woman; and she has a marvellous appreciation of
art, of painting, of poetry, of acting, of music. She is almost the
only woman to whom I have ever played Beethoven who has seemed to me
thoroughly _simpatica_.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mildred, surprised, “you yourself play, then?”

“It is hardly a merit in me,” answered Castellani modestly; “my father
was one of the finest musicians of his time in Italy.”

“Indeed!”

“You are naturally surprised. His genius was poorly appreciated. His
name was hardly known out of Milan and Brussels. Strange to say, those
stolid Flemings appreciated him. His work was over the heads of the
vulgar public. He saw such men as Verdi and Gounod triumphant, while he
remained obscure.”

“But surely you admire Verdi and Gounod?”

“In their places, yes; both are admirable; but my father’s place should
have been in a higher rank of composers. But let me not plague you
about him. He is dead, and forgotten. He died crown-less. I heard you
playing Mozart’s ‘Gloria’ as I came in. You like Mozart?”

“I adore him.”

“Yes, I know there are still people who like his music. Chopin did;
asked for it on his death-bed,” said Castellani, with a wry face, as
if he were talking of a vulgar propensity for sauerkraut or a morbid
hankering for asafœtida.

“How I wish you would play something while we are waiting for my
husband!” said Mildred, seeing her visitor’s gaze wandering to the open
piano.

“If you will go into the garden and take your tea, I will play with
delight while you take it. I doubt if I could play to you in cold
blood. I know you are critical.”

“And you think I am not _simpatica_,” retorted Mildred, laughing
at him. She was quite at her ease with him already, all thought of
that Judas face in the church being forgotten. His half-deferential,
half-caressing manner; his easy confidences about himself and his own
tastes, had made her more familiar with his individuality in the space
of an hour than she would have been with the average Englishman in
a month. She did not know whether she liked or disliked him; but he
amused her, and it was a new sensation for her to feel amused.

She sauntered softly out to the lawn, and he began to play.

Heavens, what a touch! Was it really _her_ piano which answered with
tones so exquisite—which gave forth such thrilling melody? He played
an improvised arrangement of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” and she stood
entranced till the last dying _arpeggio_ melted into silence. No one
could doubt that he came of a race gifted in music.

“Pray don’t leave the piano,” she said softly, from her place by the
open window.

“I will play till you call me away,” he answered, as he began Chopin’s
Etude in C sharp minor.

That weird and impassioned composition reached its close just as George
Greswold approached from a little gate on the other side of the lawn.
Mildred went to meet him, and Castellani left the piano and came out of
the window to be presented to his host.

Nothing could be more strongly marked than the contrast between the two
men, as they stood facing each other in the golden light of afternoon.
Greswold, tall, broad-shouldered, rugged-looking, in his rough brown
heather suit and deerstalker cap, carrying a thick stick, with an iron
fork at the end of it, for the annihilation of chance weeds in his
peregrinations. His fine and massive features had a worn look, his
cheeks were hollow, his dark hair and beard were grizzled here and
there, his dark complexion had lost the hue of youth. He looked ten
years older than his actual age.

Before him stood the Italian, graceful, gracious in every line and
every movement; his features delicately chiselled, his eyes dark, full,
and bright; his complexion of that milky pallor which is so often seen
with hair tending towards red; his brown beard of silkiest texture;
his hands delicately modelled and of ivory whiteness; his dress imbued
with all the grace which a fashionable tailor can give to the clothes
of a man who cultivates the beautiful, even in the barren field of
nineteenth century costume. It was impossible that so marked a contrast
could escape Mildred’s observation altogether; yet she perceived it
dimly. The picture came back to her memory afterwards in more vivid
colours.

She made the necessary introduction, and then proceeded to pour out the
tea, leaving the two men to talk to each other.

“Your name has an Italian sound,” Greswold said presently.

“It is a Milanese name. My father was a native of Milan; my mother
was French, but she was educated in England, and all her proclivities
were English. It was at her desire my father sent me to Rugby, and
afterwards to Cambridge. Her fatal illness called me back to Italy
immediately after I had got my degree, and it was some years before I
again visited England.”

“Were you in Italy all that time?” asked Greswold, looking down
absently, and with an unwonted trouble in his face.

Mildred sat at the tea-table, the visitor waiting upon her, insisting
upon charging himself with her husband’s cup as well as his own; an
attention and reversal of etiquette of which Mr. Greswold seemed
unconscious. Kassandra had returned with her master from a long walk,
and was lying at his feet in elderly exhaustion. She saluted the
stranger with a suppressed growl when he approached with the tea-cups.
Kassandra adored her own people, but was not remarkable for civility to
strangers.

“Yes; I wasted four or five years in the South—in Florence, in Venice,
or along the Riviera, wandering about like Satan, not having made up
my mind what to do in the world.”

Greswold was silent, bending down to play with Kassandra, who wagged
her tail with a gentle largo movement, in grateful contentment.

“You must have heard my father’s name when you were at Milan,” said
Castellani. “His music was fashionable _there_.”

Mildred looked up with a surprised expression. She had never heard her
husband talk of Milan, and yet this stranger mentioned his residence
there as if it were an established fact.

“How did you know I was ever at Milan?” asked Greswold, looking up
sharply.

“For the simplest of reasons. I had the honour of meeting you on
more than one occasion at large assemblies, where my insignificant
personality would hardly impress itself upon your memory. And I met you
a year later at Lady Lochinvar’s palace at Nice, soon after your first
marriage.”

Mildred looked up at her husband. He was pale as ashes, his lips
whitening as she gazed at him. She felt her own cheeks paling; felt
a sudden coldness creeping over her, as if she were going to faint.
She watched her husband dumbly, expecting him to tell this man that he
was mistaken, that he was confounding him, George Greswold, with some
one else; but Greswold sat silent, and presently, as if to hide his
confusion, bent again over the dog, who got up suddenly and licked his
face in a gush of affection—as if she knew—as if she knew.

He had been married before, and he had told his wife not one word of
that first marriage. There had been no hint of the fact that he was a
widower when he asked John Fausset for his daughter’s hand.




CHAPTER XI.

THE BEGINNING OF DOUBT.


Enderby Church clock struck six. They heard every chime, slow and clear
in the summer stillness, as they sat in the broad shadow of the cedar,
silent all three.

It seemed as if the striking of the clock were the breaking of a spell.

“So late?” exclaimed Castellani, in a cheery voice; “and I promised
Mrs. Hillersdon to be back in time to drive to Romsey for the evening
service. The old Abbey Church of Romsey, she tells me, is a thing to
dream about. There is no eight o’clock dinner at Riverdale on Sundays.
Every one goes to church somewhere, and we sup at half-past nine, and
after supper there is sometimes extempore prayer—and sometimes there
are charades or dumb crambo. _C’est selon._ When the Prince was there
they had dumb crambo. Good-bye. I am almost ashamed to ask if I may
ever come again, after having bored you for such an unconscionable
time.”

He had the easiest air possible, and seemed totally unconscious of
any embarrassment caused by his allusions to the past; and yet in
both faces, as he looked from one to the other, he must have seen the
strongest indications of trouble.

Mrs. Greswold murmured something to the effect that she would be glad
to see him at any time, a speech obviously conventional and unmeaning.
Mr. Greswold rose hastily and accompanied him to the hall-door,
where the cart still waited for him, the groom fixed as a statue of
despondency.

Mr. Castellani was inclined to be loquacious to the last. Greswold was
brief almost to incivility. He stood watching the light cart roll away,
and then went slowly back to the garden and to his seat under the cedar.

He seated himself without a word, looking earnestly at his wife,
whose drooping head and fixed attitude told of deepest thought. So
they sat for some minutes in dead silence, Kassandra licking her
master’s pendant hand, as he leaned forward with his elbow on his knee,
infinitely sorry for him.

Mildred was the first to break that silence.

“George, why did you not tell me,” she began in a low faltering
voice, “that I was not your first wife? What reason could there be
for concealment between you and me? I so trusted you; I so loved you.
Nothing you could have told would have changed me.”

“Dearest, there was one reason, and a powerful one,” answered George
Greswold firmly, meeting the appealing look of her eyes with a clear
and steady gaze. “My first marriage is a sad remembrance for me—full
of trouble. I did not care to tell you that miserable story, to call a
dreaded ghost out of the grave of the past. My first marriage was the
one great sorrow of my life, but it was only an episode in my life. It
left me as lonely as it found me. There are very few who know anything
about it. I am sorry that young man should have come here to trouble us
with his uninvited reminiscences. For my own part, I cannot remember
having ever seen his face before.”

“I am sorry you should have kept such a secret from me,” said Mildred.
“It would have been so much wiser to have been candid. Do you think I
should not have respected your sad memories? You had only to say to me
‘Such things were; but let us not talk of them.’ It would have been
more manly; it would have been kinder to me.”

“Say that I was a coward, if you like; that I am still a coward, where
those memories are concerned,” said Greswold.

The look of agony in his face melted her in a moment. She threw herself
on her knees beside his chair, she and the dog fawning upon him
together.

“Forgive me, forgive me, dearest,” she pleaded, “I will never speak to
you of this again. Women are so jealous—of the past most of all.”

“Is that all?” he said: “God knows you have little need. Let us say no
more, Mildred. The past is past: neither you nor I can alter it. Memory
is inexorable. God Himself cannot change it.”

“I will contrive that Mr. Castellani shall not come here again, George,
if you object to see him.”

“Pray don’t trouble yourself. I would not have such a worm suppose that
he could be obnoxious to me.”

“Tell me what you think of him,” she asked, in a lighter tone, anxious
to bring back the easy mood of every-day life. “He seems very clever,
and he is rather handsome.”

“What do I think of the trumpet-ash on the verandah yonder? A beautiful
parasite, which will hold on anywhere in the sunshine. Mr. Castellani
is of the same family, I take it—studies his own interests first, and
chooses his friends afterwards. He will do admirably for Riverdale.”

“He plays divinely. His touch transformed my piano.”

“He looks the kind of man who would play the piano,” said Greswold,
with ineffable contempt, looking down at his own sunburnt hands,
hardened by exposure to all weathers, broadened by handling gun and
punt-pole, and by half-a-dozen other forms of out-door exercise.
“However, I have no objection to him, if he serve to amuse you and
Pamela.”

He spoke with a kind of weary indifference, as of a man who cared for
very little in life; and then he rose slowly, took up his stick, and
strolled off to the shrubbery.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pamela appeared on the following afternoon with boxes, bags,
music-books, raquets, and parasols, in a proportion which gave promise
of a long visit. She had asked as a tremendous favour to be allowed
to bring Box—otherwise Fitz-Box—her fox-terrier, son of Sir Henry
Mountford’s Box, great-grandson of Brockenhurst Joe, through that
distinguished animal’s daughter Lyndhurst Jessie, and on the paternal
side a lineal descendant of Mr. Murchison’s Cracknel.

“I hope you won’t mind very much,” she wrote; “but it would be death to
him if I were to leave him behind. To begin with, his brother Fitz-Cox,
who has a villanous temper, would inevitably kill him; and besides
that, he would pine to death at not sleeping in my room at night, which
he has done ever since he was a puppy. If you will let me bring him, I
will answer for his good manners, and that he shall not be a trouble to
any one.”

The descendant of Brockenhurst Joe rushed out into the garden, and made
a lightning circuit of lawn and shrubberies, while his young mistress
was kissing her Aunt Mildred, as she called her uncle’s wife in the
fulness of her affection.

“It is so very good of you to have me, and I am so delighted to come!”
she said.

Mildred would have much preferred that she were anywhere else, yet
could not help feeling kindly to her. She was a frank, bright-looking
girl, with brown eyes, and almost flaxen hair; a piquant contrast, for
the hair was genuine, and carried out in the eyebrows, which were only
just a shade darker. Her complexion was fair to transparency, and she
had just enough soft rosy bloom to light up the delicate skin. Her nose
was slightly _retroussé_, her mouth was a little wider than she herself
approved, and her teeth were perfection. She had a charming figure of
the plump order, but its plumpness was a distress to her.

“Don’t you think I get horribly stout?” she asked Mildred, when she was
sitting at tea in the garden presently.

“You may be a little stouter than you were at sixteen, perhaps, but not
at all too stout.”

“O, but I am! I know it, I feel it. Don’t endeavour to spare my
feelings, aunt. It is useless. I know I am fat. Rosalind says I ought
to marry; but I tell her it’s absurd. How can anybody ever care for me
now I am fat? They would only want my money if they asked me to marry
them,” concluded Pamela, clinging to the plural.

“My dear Pamela, do you wish me to tell you that you are charming, and
all that you ought to be?” asked Mildred, laughing.

“O, no, no! I don’t want you to spare my feelings. Everybody spares
one’s feelings. One grows up in ignorance of the horrors in one’s
appearance, because people _will_ spare one’s feelings. And then one
sees oneself in a strange glass; or a boy in the street says something,
and one knows the worst. I think I know the worst about myself. That
is one comfort. How lovely it is here!” said Pamela, with a sudden
change of mood, glancing at Mildred with a little pathetic look as she
remembered the childish figure that must be for ever missing from that
home picture.

“I am so glad to be with you,” she murmured softly, nestling up to
Mildred’s side, as they sat together on a rustic bench; “let me be
useful to you, let me be a companion to you, if you can.”

“You shall be both, dear.”

“How good to say that! And you won’t mind Box?”

“Not the least. If he will be amiable to Kassandra.”

“He will. He has been brought up among other dogs. We are a very doggy
family at the Hall. Would you think he was worth a hundred and fifty
guineas?” asked Pamela with ill-concealed pride, as the scion of
illustrious progenitors came up and put his long lean head in her hand,
and conversed with her in a series of expressive snorts, as it were a
conversational code.

“I hardly know what constitutes perfection in a fox-terrier.”

“No more do I; but I know he is perfect. He is said to be the image of
Cracknel, only better. I tremble when I think that my possession of
him hangs by a thread. He might be stolen at any moment.”

“You must be careful.”

“Yes, I cannot be too careful. Here comes Uncle George,” said Pamela,
rising and running to meet Mr. Greswold. “O, Uncle George, _how_
altered you are!”

She was always saying the wrong thing, after the manner of impulsive
girls; and she was quickwitted enough to discover her mistake the
instant after.

Happily the dogs furnished a ready diversion. She introduced Box, and
expatiated upon his grand qualities. She admired and made friends with
Kassandra, and then settled down almost as lightly as a butterfly, in
spite of her plumpness, on a Japanese stool, to take her teacup from
Mildred’s hands.

She was perfectly at her ease by this time, and told her uncle and
aunt all about her sister Rosalind, and Rosalind’s husband, Sir Henry
Mountford, whom she summed up lightly as a nice old thing, and no end
of fun. It was easy to divine from her discourse that Rainham Hall was
not an especially intellectual atmosphere, not a school of advanced
thought, or of any other kind of thought. Pamela’s talk was of tennis,
yachting, fishing, and shooting, and of the people who shared in those
sports. She seemed to belong to a world in which nobody ever sat down
except to eat, or stayed indoors except under stress of weather.

“I hear you have all manner of clever people in your neighbourhood,”
she said by and by, having told all she had to tell about Rainham.

“Have we?” asked Greswold, smiling at her intensity.

“Yes, at Riverdale. They do say the author of _Nepenthe_ is staying
there, and that he is not a Roman Cardinal or an English statesman, but
almost a young man—an Italian by birth—and _very_ handsome. I would
give worlds to see him.”

“It is not unlikely you may be gratified without giving anything,”
answered her uncle. “Mr. Castellani was here yesterday afternoon, and
threatened to repeat his visit.”

“Castellani! Yes, that is the name I heard. What a pretty name! And
what is he like? Do tell me all about him, Aunt Mildred.”

She turned to the woman as the more likely to give her a graphic
description. The average man is an undescribing animal.

Mildred made an effort at self-command before she spoke. Castellani
counted for but little in her recent trouble. His revelation had been
an accident, and its effect entirely dissociated from him. Yet the very
thought of the man troubled her, and the dread of seeing him again was
like a physical pain.

“I do not know what to say about his appearance,” she answered
presently, slowly fanning herself with a great scarlet Japanese fan,
pale and cool looking in her plain white gown with its black ribbons.
The very picture of domestic peace, one would suppose, judging by
externals only. “I suppose there are people who would think him
handsome.”

“Don’t you, aunt?”

“No. I don’t like the colour of his eyes or of his hair. They are
of that reddish-brown which the Venetian painters are so fond of,
but which always gives me an idea of falsehood and treachery. Mr.
Castellani is a very clever man, but he is not a man whom I could ever
trust.”

“How nice!” cried Pamela, her face radiant with enthusiasm; “a creature
with red-brown hair, and eyes with a depth of falsehood in them. That
is just the kind of man who might be the author of _Nepenthe_. If
you had told me he was stout and rosy-cheeked, with pepper-and-salt
whiskers and a fine, benevolent head, I would never have opened his
book again.”

“You seem to admire this _Nepenthe_ prodigiously,” said her uncle,
looking at her with a calmly critical air. “Is it because the book is
the fashion, or from your own unassisted appreciation of it? I did not
think you were a bookish person.”

“I’m not,” cried Pamela. “I am a mass of ignorance. I don’t know
anything about science. I don’t know the name of a single butterfly.
I don’t know one toadstool from another. But when I love a book it
is a passion with me. My Keats has tumbled to pieces; my Shelley is
disgracefully dirty. I have read _Nepenthe_ six times, and I am
waiting for the cheap edition, to keep it under my pillow. It has made
me an Agnostic.”

“Do you know the dictionary meaning of that word?”

“I don’t think I do; but I know I am an Agnostic. _Nepenthe_ has
unsettled all my old beliefs. If I had read it four years ago I should
have refused to be confirmed. I am dying to know the author.”

“You like unbelievers, then?” said Mr. Greswold.

“I adore men who dare to doubt, who are not afraid to stand apart from
their fellow-men.”

“On a bad eminence?”

“Yes, on a bad eminence. What a sweet expression! I can never
understand Goethe’s _Gretchen_.”

“Why not?”

“How could she have cared for _Faust_, when she had the privilege of
knowing _Mephistopheles_?”

       *       *       *       *       *

Pamela Ransome had established herself in her pretty bedroom and
dressing-room, and had supervised her maid while she unpacked and
arranged all her belongings, before dinner-time. She came down to the
drawing-room, at a quarter to eight, as thoroughly at her ease as if
she had lived half her life at Enderby Manor. She was a kind of visitor
who gives no trouble, and who drops into the right place instinctively.
Mildred Greswold felt cheered by her presence, in spite of that
ever-recurrent pang of memory which associated all young bright things
with the sweet girl-child who should have grown to womanhood under that
roof, and who was lying a little way off, under the ripening berries of
the mountain-ash, and in the deep shadow of a century-old yew.

They were very quiet in the drawing-room after dinner; Greswold reading
in a nook apart, by the light of his own particular lamp; his wife
bending over an embroidery-frame in her corner near the piano, where
she had her own special dwarf bookcase and her work-basket, and the
_bonheur du jour_ at which she sometimes wrote letters, her own little
table scattered with old family miniatures by Angelica Kaufmann,
Cosway, and Ross, and antique watches in enamelled cases, and boxes of
porcelain and gold and silver, every one of which had its history.
Every woman who lives much at home has some such corner, where the very
atmosphere is full of home thoughts. She asked her niece to play, and
to go on playing as long as she liked; and Pamela, pleased with the
touch of the Broadwood grand, rang the changes upon Chopin, Schumann,
Raff, and Brahm, choosing those compositions which least jarred upon
the atmosphere of studious repose.

Mildred’s needle moved slowly, as she sat in her low chair, with her
hands in the lamp-light and her face in shadow, moved very slowly, and
then stopped altogether, and the white hands lay idle in her lap, and
the embroidery-frame, with its half-finished group of azaleas, slid
from her knee to the ground. She was thinking—thinking of that one
subject which had possessed her thoughts since yesterday afternoon;
which had kept her awake through the brief darkness of the summer night
and in the slow hours betwixt dawn and seven o’clock, when the entrance
of the maid with the early cup of tea marked the beginning of the daily
routine. In all those hours her thoughts had revolved round that one
theme with an intolerable recurrence.

It was of her husband’s first marriage she thought, and of his motive
for silence about that marriage: that he who, in the whole course of
their wedded lives, had been the very spirit of single-minded candour,
should yet have suppressed this all-important event in his past
history, was a fact in itself so startling and mysterious that it might
well be the focus of a wife’s troubled thoughts. He could not so have
acted without some all-sufficient reason; and what manner of reason
could that have been which had influenced him to conduct so entirely at
variance with his own character?

What was there in the history of that marriage which had sealed his
lips, which made it horrible to him to speak about it, even when fair
dealing with the girl who was to be his wife should have constrained
frankness?

Had he been cursed with a wicked wife; some beautiful creature, who had
caught his heart in her toils, as a cat catches a bird, and had won him
only to betray and to dishonour him? Had she blighted his life, branded
him with the shame of a forsaken husband?

And then a hideous dread floated across her mind. What if that
first wife were still living—divorced from him? Had she, Mildred
Fausset, severely trained in the strictest principles of the Anglican
Church—taught her creed by an ascetic who deemed divorce unchristian
and an abomination, and who had always refused to marry those who had
been divorced—had she, in whose life and mind religion and duty were as
one feeling and one principle—had she been trapped into a union with
a man whose wife yet lived, and in the sight of God was yet one with
him—a wife who might crawl penitent to his feet some day, and claim him
as her own again by the right of tears and prayers and a soul cleansed
from sin? Such a sinner must have some hold, some claim even to the
last, upon the man who once was her husband, who once swore to cherish
her and cleave to her, of whom it had once been said, “And they two
shall be one flesh.”

No; again and again, no. She could not believe George Greswold capable
of such deep dishonour as to have concealed the existence of a divorced
wife. No; the reason for that mysterious silence must be another
reason than this.

She had sinned against him, it might be, and had died in her sin, under
circumstances too sad to be told without infinite pain; and he, who had
never in her experience shown himself wanting in moral courage, had
in this one crisis of his life acted as the coward acts. He had kept
silence where conscience should have constrained him to speak.

And then the wife’s vivid fancy conjured up the image of that other
wife. Her jealous fears depicted that wife of past years as a being to
be loved and remembered until death—beautiful, fascinating, gifted with
all the qualities that charm mankind. “He can never care for me as he
once cared for her,” Mildred told herself. “She was his first love.”

His first—the first revelation of what love means to the passionate
heart of youth. What a world there is in that! Mildred remembered how
a new life began for her with the awakening of her love for George
Greswold. What a strange sweet enchantment, what an intoxicating
gladness which glorified the whole face of nature! The river, and the
reedy islets, and the pollard willows, and the autumn sunsets—things so
simple and familiar—had all taken new colours in that magical dawn of
her first love.

She—that unknown woman—had been George Greswold’s first love. Mildred
envied her that brief life, whose sole distinction was to have been
loved by him.

“Why do I imagine a mystery about her?” she argued, after long
brooding. “The only secret was that he loved her as he could never love
me, and he feared to tell me as much lest I should refuse the remnant
of a heart. It was out of kindness to me that he kept silence. It would
have pained me too much to know how _she_ had been loved.”

She knew that her husband was a man of exceeding sensitiveness; she
knew him capable of almost woman-like delicacy. Was it altogether
unnatural that such a man should have held back the history of his
first marriage—with its passionate love, its heart-broken ending—from
the enthusiastic girl who had given him all her heart, and to whom he
could give so little in return?

“He may have seen how I loved him, and may have married me half out of
pity,” she said to herself finally, with unspeakable bitterness.

Yet if this were so, could they have been so happy together, so
completely united—save in that one secret of the past, that one dark
regret which had revealed itself from time to time in an agonising
dream? He had walked that dark labyrinth of sleep alone with his
sorrow: there she could not follow him.

She remembered the awful sound of those broken sentences—spoken to
shadows in a land of shadow. She remembered how acutely she had felt
his remoteness as he sat up in bed, pale as death, his eyes open and
fixed, his lips muttering. He and the dead were face to face in the
halls of the past. _She_ had no part in his life, or in his memory.




CHAPTER XII.

“SHE CANNOT BE UNWORTHY.”


Mr. Castellani did not wait long before he availed himself of Mrs.
Greswold’s permission to repeat his visit. He appeared on Friday
afternoon, at the orthodox hour of half-past three, when Mildred and
her niece were sitting in the drawing-room, exhausted by a long morning
at Salisbury, where they had explored the cathedral, and lunched in the
Close with a clever friend of George Greswold’s, who had made his mark
on modern literature.

“I adore Salisbury Close,” said Pamela, as she looked through the
old-fashioned window to the old-fashioned garden; “it reminds me of
Honoria.”

She did not deem it necessary to explain what Honoria she meant,
presuming a universal acquaintance with Coventry Patmore’s gentle
heroine.

The morning had been sultry, the homeward drive long, and both ladies
were resting in comfortable silence, each with a book, when Castellani
was announced.

Mildred received him rather coldly, trying her uttermost to seem
thoroughly at ease. She introduced him to her niece, Miss Ransome.

“The daughter of the late Mr. Randolph Ransome and the sister of Lady
Mountford?” Castellani inquired presently, when Pamela had run out on
the lawn to speak to Box.

“Yes. You seem to know everybody’s belongings.”

“Why not? It is the duty of every man of the world, more especially of
a foreigner. I know Mr. Ransome’s place in the Sussex Weald—a very fine
property—and I know that the two ladies are coheiresses, but that the
Sussex estate is to descend to the eldest son of the elder daughter, or
failing male issue there, to the son of the younger. Lady Mountford has
a baby-son, I believe.”

“Your information is altogether correct.”

“Why should it be otherwise? Mr. Hillersdon and his wife discussed
the family history to-day at luncheon, _apropos_ to Miss Ransome’s
appearance in Romsey Church at the Saint’s Day service yesterday.”

His frankness apologised for his impertinence, and he was a foreigner,
which seems always to excuse a great deal.

Pamela came back again, after rescuing Box from a rough-and-tumble
game with Kassandra. She looked rosy and breathless, and very pretty,
in her pale-blue gown and girlish sash flying in the wind, and flaxen
hair fluffed into a feathery pile on the top of her head, and honest
brown eyes. She resumed her seat in the deep old window behind the end
of the piano, and made believe to go on with some work, which she took
in a tangled heap from a very untidy basket. Already Pamela had set
the sign of her presence upon the drawing-rooms at Enderby, a trail of
heterogeneous litter which was a part of her individuality. Screened by
the piano, she was able to observe Castellani, as he stood leaning over
the large central ottoman, with his knee on the cushioned seat, talking
to Mrs. Greswold.

He was the author of _Nepenthe_. It was in that character he interested
her. She looked at him with the thought of his book full in her mind.
It was one of those half-mad, wholly artificial compositions which
delight girls and young men, and which are just clever enough, and
have just enough originality to get talked about and written about by
the cultured few. It was a love-story, ending tragically; a story of
ruined lives and broken hearts, told in the autobiographical form,
with a studied avoidance of all conventional ornament, which gave an
air of reality where all was inherently false. Pamela thought it must
be Castellani’s own story. She fancied she could see the traces of
those heartbreaking experiences, those crushing disappointments in his
countenance, in his bearing even, and in the tones of his voice, which
gave an impression of mental fatigue, as of a man worn out by a fatal
passion.

The story of _Nepenthe_ was as old as the hills—or at least as old as
the Boulevard des Capucines and the Palais Royal. It was the story
of a virtuous young man’s love for an unvirtuous woman—the story of
Demetrius and Lamia—the story of a man’s demoralisation under the
influence of incarnate falsehood, of the gradual lapse from good to
evil, the gradual extinction of every belief and every scruple, the
final destruction of a soul.

The wicked siren was taken, her victim was left; but left to expiate
that miserable infatuation by an after-life of misery; left without a
joy in the present or a hope in the future.

“He looks like it,” thought Pamela, remembering that final chapter.

Mrs. Greswold was putting a few slow stitches into the azalea-leaves on
her embroidery-frame, and listening to Mr. Castellani with an air of
polite indifference.

“Do you know that Riverdale is quite the most delightful house I have
ever stayed in?” he said; “and I have stayed in a great many. And do
you know that Mrs. Hillersdon is heart-broken at your never having
called upon her?”

“I am sorry so small a matter should touch Mrs. Hillersdon’s heart.”

“She feels it intensely. She told me so yesterday. Perfect candour
is one of the charms of her character. She is as emotional and as
transparent as a child. Why have you not called on her?”

“You forget that Riverdale is seven miles from this house.”

“Does not your charity extend so far? Are people who live seven miles
off beyond the pale? I think you must visit a little further afield
than seven miles. There must be some other reason.”

“There is another reason, which I had rather not talk about.”

“I understand. You consider Mrs. Hillersdon a person not to be visited.
Long ago, when you were a child in the nursery, Mrs. Hillersdon was
an undisciplined, inexperienced girl, and the world used her hardly.
Is that old history never to be forgotten? Men, who know it all, have
agreed to forget it: why should women, who only know a fragment, so
obstinately remember?”

“I know nothing, and remember nothing, about Mrs. Hillersdon. My
friends are, for the most part, those of my husband’s choice, and I
pay no visits without his approval. He does not wish me to visit
at Riverdale. You have forced me to give you a plain answer, Mr.
Castellani.”

“Why not? Plain truth is always best. I am sorry Mr. Greswold has
interdicted my charming friend. You can have no idea how excellent
a woman she is, or how admirable a wife. Tom Hillersdon might have
searched the county from border to border and not have found as good
a woman—looked at as the woman best calculated to make him happy. And
what delightful people she has brought about him! One of the most
interesting men I ever met arrived yesterday, and is to preach the
hospital sermon at Romsey next Sunday. He is an old friend of yours.”

“A clergyman, and an old friend of mine, at Riverdale!”

“A man of ascetic life and exceptional culture. I never heard any man
talk of Dante better than he talked to me last night in a moonlight
stroll on the terrace, while the other men were in the smokingroom.”

“Surely you do not mean Mr. Cancellor, the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s,
Parchment Street?”

“That is the man—Clement Cancellor, Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He looks
like a mediæval monk just stepped out of one of Bellini’s altar-pieces.”

“He is the noblest, most unselfish of men,” said Mildred warmly; “he
has given his life to doing good among rich and poor. It is so long
since I have seen him. We have asked him to Enderby very often, but he
has always been too busy to come. And to think that he should be in
this neighbourhood and I know nothing about it; and to think that he
should go to Riverdale rather than come here!”

“He had hardly any option. It was Mrs. Hillersdon who asked him to
preach on Hospital Sunday. She extorted a promise from him three
months ago in London. The Vicar of Romsey was enchanted. ‘You are the
cleverest woman I know,’ he said. ‘No one else could have got me such a
great gun.’”

“A great gun—Mr. Cancellor a great gun! I can only think of him as I
knew him when I was twelve years old: a tall, thin young man, in a
very shabby coat—he was curate at St. Elizabeth’s then—very gaunt and
hollow-cheeked, but with such a sweet smile. He used to come twice a
week to teach me the history of the Bible and the Church. He made me
love both.”

“He is gaunt and hollow-cheeked still, tall and bony and sallow, and
he still wears a shabby coat. You will not find much difference in
him, I fancy—only so many more years of hard work and self-sacrifice,
ascetic living and nightly study. A man to know Dante as he does must
have given years of his life to that one poet—and I am told that in
literature Cancellor is an all-round man. His monograph on Pascal is
said to be the best of a brilliant series of such studies.”

“I hope he will come to see his old pupil before he leaves the
neighbourhood.”

“He means to do so. He was talking of it yesterday evening—asking
Mrs. Hillersdon if she was intimate with you—so awkward for poor Mrs.
Hillersdon.”

“I shall be very glad to see him again.”

“May I drive him over to tea to-morrow afternoon?”

“He will be welcome here at any time.”

“Or with any one? If Mrs. Hillersdon were to bring him, would you still
refuse to receive her?”

“I have never refused to receive her. We have met and talked to each
other on public occasions. If Mr. Cancellor likes her she cannot be
unworthy.”

“May she come with him to-morrow?” persisted Castellani.

“If she likes,” faltered Mildred, wondering that any woman could so
force an entrance to another woman’s house.

She did not know that it was by such forced entrances Mrs. Hillersdon
had made her way in society until some of the best houses in London had
been opened to her.

“If you are not in a hurry to leave us, I know my niece would much like
to hear you play,” she said, feeling that the talk about Riverdale had
been dull work for Pamela.

Miss Ransome murmured assent.

“If you will play something of Beethoven’s,” she entreated.

“Do you object to Mozart?” he asked, forgetting his depreciation of the
valet-musician’s son a few days before, “I feel more in the humour
for that prince of dramatists. I will give you the supper in _Don
Giovanni_. You shall see Leporello trembling. You shall hear the tramp
of ghostly feet.”

And then, improvising upon a familiar theme, he gave his own version of
that wonderful scene, and that music so played conjured up a picture as
vivid as ever opera-house furnished to an enthralled audience.

Pamela listened in silent rapture. What a God-gifted creature this
was, who had so deeply moved her by his pen, who moved her even more
intensely by that magical touch upon the piano!

When he had played those last crashing chords which consigned the
profligate to his doom, he waited for a minute or so, and then, softly,
as if almost unawares, in mere absent-minded idleness, his hands
wandered into the staccato accompaniment of the serenade, and, with
the finest tenor Mildred had heard since she heard Sim Reeves, he sang
those delicate and dainty phrases with which the seducer woos his last
divinity.

He rose from the piano at the close of that lovely air, smiling at his
hearers.

“I had no idea that you were a singer as well as a pianist,” said
Mildred.

“You forget that music is my native tongue. My father taught me to
play before he taught me to read, and I knew harmony before I knew my
alphabet. I was brought up in the house of a man who lived only for
music—to whom all stringed instruments were as his mother tongue. It
was by a caprice that he made me play the piano—which he rarely touched
himself.”

“He must have been a great genius,” said Pamela, with girlish fervour.

“Alas! no, he just missed greatness, and he just missed genius. He
was a highly-gifted man—various—capricious—volatile—and he married
a woman with just enough money to ruin him. Had he been obliged to
earn his bread, he might have been great. Who can say? Hunger is the
slave-driver, with his whip of steel, who peoples the Valhalla of
nations. If Homer had not been a beggar—as well as blind—we might have
had no story of Troy. Good-bye, Mrs. Greswold. Good-bye,” shaking
hands with Pamela. “I _may_ bring my hostess to-morrow?”

“I—I—suppose so,” Mildred answered feebly, wondering what her husband
would think of such an invasion.

Yet, if Clement Cancellor, who to Mildred’s mind had always seemed the
ideal Christian priest, if he could tolerate and consort with her,
could she, Mildred Greswold, persist in the Pharisee’s part, and hold
herself aloof from this neighbour, to whose good works and kindly
disposition many voices had testified in her hearing?




CHAPTER XIII.

SHALL SHE BE LESS THAN ANOTHER?


It was in all good faith that Clement Cancellor had gone to Riverdale.
He had not gone there for the fleshpots of Egypt. He was a man of
severely ascetic habits, who ate and drank as temperately as a disciple
of that old faith of the East which is gaining a curious influence upon
our new life of the West. For him the gratification of the senses,
soft raiment, artistic furniture, thoroughbred horses and luxurious
carriages, palm-houses and orchid-houses, offered no temptation. He
stayed in Mrs. Hillersdon’s house because he was her friend, her
friend upon the broadest and soundest basis on which friendship could
be built. He knew all that was to be known about her. He knew her
frailties of the past, her virtues in the present, her exalted hope
in the future. From her own lips he had heard the story of Louise
Lorraine’s life. She had extenuated nothing. She had not withheld from
him either the foulness of her sins or their number—nay, it may be that
she had in somewise exaggerated the blackness of those devils whom he,
Clement Cancellor, had cast out from her, enhancing by just so much the
magnitude of the miracle he had wrought. She had held back nothing; but
over every revelation she had contrived to spread that gloss which a
clever woman knows how to give to the tale of her own wrong-doing. In
every incident of that evil career she had contrived to show herself
more sinned against than sinning; the fragile victim of overmastering
wickedness in others; the martyr of man’s treachery and man’s passion;
the sport of fate and circumstance. Had Mr. Cancellor known the world
he lived in half as well as he knew the world beyond he would hardly
have believed so readily in the lady who had been Louise Lorraine: but
he was too single-minded to doubt a repentant sinner whose conversion
from the ways of evil had been made manifest by so many good works, and
such unflagging zeal in the exercises of the Anglican Church.

Parchment Street, Grosvenor Square, is one of the fashionable streets
of London, and St. Elizabeth’s, Parchment Street, had gradually
developed, in Clement Cancellor’s incumbency, into one of the most
popular tabernacles at the West End. He whose life-desire had been
to carry the lamp of the faith into dark places, to be the friend
and teacher of the friendless and the untaught, found himself almost
in spite of himself a fashionable preacher, and the delight of the
cultured, the wealthy, and the aristocratic. In his parish of St.
Elizabeth’s there was plenty of work for him to do—plenty of that
work which he had chosen as the mission that had been given to him to
fulfil. Behind those patrician streets where only the best-appointed
carriages drew up, where only the best-dressed footmen ever pulled
the bells or rattled long peals on high-art knockers, there were some
of the worst slums in London, and it was in those slums that half
Mr. Cancellor’s life was spent. In narrow alleys between Oxford and
Wigmore Streets, and in the intricate purlieus of Marylebone Lane, the
Anglican priest had ample scope for his labour, a vineyard waiting for
the husbandman. And in the labyrinth hidden in the heart of West End
London Mr. Cancellor’s chief coadjutor for the last twenty years had
been Louise Hillersdon. Thoroughness was the supreme quality of Mrs.
Hillersdon’s mind. Nothing stopped her. It was this temper which had
given her distinction in the days when princes were her cupbearers and
diamonds her daily tribute. There had been other women as beautiful,
other women as fascinating; but there was not one who with beauty and
fascination combined the audacity and resolution of Louise Lorraine.
When Louise Lorraine took possession of a man’s wits and a man’s
fortune that man was doomed. He was as completely gone as the lemon in
the iron squeezer. A twist of the machine, and there is nothing left
but broken rind and crushed pulp. A season of infatuation, and there
was nothing left of Mrs. Lorraine’s admirer but shattered health and
an overdrawn banking account. Estates, houses, friends, position, good
name, all dropped away from the man whom Louise Lorraine brayed in her
mortar. She spoke of him next season with half contemptuous pity. “Did
I know Sir Theodore Barrymore? Yes; he used to come to my parties
sometimes. A nice fellow enough, but such a terrible fool.”

When Louise Lorraine married Tom Hillersdon, and took it into her head
to break away altogether from her past career, and to pose before the
world as a beautiful Magdalen, she was clever enough to know that, to
achieve any place in society, she must have a very powerful influence
to help her. She was clever enough to discover that the one influence
which a woman in her position could count upon was the influence of
the Church. She was beautiful enough and refined enough to win friends
among the clergy by the charm of her personality. She was rich enough
to secure such friends, and bind them to herself by the splendour of
her gifts, by her substantial aid in those good works which are to
the priest as the very breath of his life. One man she could win by
an organ; another lived only to complete a steeple; the third had
been yearning for a decade for that golden hour when the cracked
tintinabulation which now summoned his flock should be exchanged for a
fine peal of bells. Such men as these were only too easily won, and
the drawing-rooms of Mr. Hillersdon’s house in Park Lane were rarely
without the grace of some clerical figure in long frock-coat and Roman
collar.

Clement Cancellor was of a sterner stuff, and not to be bought by bell
or reredos, rood-screen or pulpit. Him Louise Hillersdon won by larger
measures: to him she offered all that was spiritual in her nature: and
this woman of strange memories was not without spiritual aspirations
and real striving after godliness. Clement Cancellor was no pious
simpleton, to be won by sentimental cant and crocodile tears. He knew
truth from falsehood, had never in his life been duped by the jingle
of false coin. He knew that Mrs. Hillersdon’s repentance had the true
ring, albeit she was in some things still of the earth earthy. She had
worked for him and with him in that wilderness of London as not one
other woman in his congregation had ever worked. To the lost of her own
sex she had been as a redeeming angel. Wretched women had blessed her
with their expiring breath, had died full of hopes that might never
have been awakened had not Louise Lorraine sat beside their beds. Few
other women had ever so influenced the erring of her sex. She who had
waded deep in the slough of sin knew how to talk to sinners.

Mr. Cancellor never forgot her as he had seen her by the bed of death
and in the haunts of iniquity. She could never be to him as the herd
of women. To the mind of the preacher she had a higher value than one
in twenty of those women of his flock whose unstained lives had never
needed the cleansing of self-sacrifice and difficult works.

Thus it was that the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s had never shrunk from
acknowledging Mrs. Hillersdon as his personal friend, had never feared
to sit at her board, or to be seen with her in public; and in the work
of Louise Lorraine’s rehabilitation Clement Cancellor had been a tower
of strength. And now this latest mark of friendship, this visit to her
country home, and this appearance in the noble old Abbey Church at her
solicitation, filled her cup of pride. These starched county people
who had shunned her hospitalities were to see that one of the most
distinguished preachers in the High Church party had given her his
friendship and his esteem.

It had been something for her to have the Prince at Riverdale: it was
still more to her to have Clement Cancellor.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pamela was in a flutter of excitement all Saturday morning, in the
expectation of Castellani’s reappearance in the afternoon. She had
heard Mr. Cancellor preach, and was delighted at the idea of seeing
him in the pleasant intimacy of afternoon tea. Had there been no such
person as Castellani, her spirits would have been on tip-toe at the
idea of conversing with the fashionable preacher—of telling him in
a reverent under-tone of all those deep emotions his eloquence had
inspired in her. But the author of _Nepenthe_ possessed just that
combination of qualities which commands the admiration of such a girl
as Pamela. That exquisite touch on the piano, that perfect tenor voice,
that exotic elegance of dress and figure, all had made their mark upon
the sensitive plate of a girl’s ardent fancy. “If I had pictured to
myself the man who wrote _Nepenthe_, I should have imagined just such
a face, just such a style,” thought Pamela, quite forgetting that when
first she had read the book she had made a very vivid picture of the
author altogether the opposite of César Castellani—a dark man, lean as
a whipping-post, grave as philosophy itself, with sombre black eyes,
and ebon hair, and a complexion of antique marble. And now she was
ready to accept the Italian, sleek, supple, essentially modern in every
grace and attribute, in place of that sage of antique mould.

She went dancing about with the dogs all the morning, inciting the
grave Kassandra to unwonted exertions, running in and out of the
drawing-room, making an atmosphere of gaiety in the grave old house.
Mildred’s heart ached as she watched that flying figure in the white
gown, youth, health, joyousness, personified.

“O, if my darling were but here, life might be full of happiness
again,” she thought. “I should cease to weary myself with wondering
about that hidden past.”

Do what she would her thoughts still dwelt upon the image of that wife
who had possessed George Greswold’s heart before her. She knew that he
must have loved that other woman whom he had sworn before God’s altar
to cherish. He was not the kind of man to marry for any motive but a
disinterested love. That he had loved passionately, and that he had
been wronged deeply, was Mildred’s reading of the mystery. There had
been a look of agony in his countenance when he spoke of the past that
told of a sorrow too deep for words.

“He has never loved me as he once loved her,” thought Mildred, who
out of the wealth of her own love had developed the capacity for that
self-torture called jealousy.

It seemed to her that her husband had taken pains to avoid the old
opportunities of confidential talk since that revelation of last
Sunday. He had been more than usually engaged by the business details
of his estate; and she fancied that he made the most of all those
duties which he used once to perform with the utmost despatch, grudging
every hour that was spent away from the home circle. He now complained
of the new steward’s ignorance, which threw so much extra work upon
himself.

“After jogging on for years in the same groove with a man who knew
every rood of my land, and the idiosyncrasies of every tenant, I find
it hard work teaching a new man,” he told his wife.

This sounded reasonable enough, yet she could but think that since
Sunday he had studiously avoided being alone with her. If he asked
her to drive or walk with him, he secured Pamela’s company before the
excursion was planned.

“We must show you the country,” he said to his niece.

Mildred told him of the threatened incursion from Riverdale as they sat
at luncheon with Pamela.

“I hope you don’t mind my receiving Mrs. Hillersdon,” she said.

“No, my dear Mildred, I think it would take a much worse woman than
Mrs. Hillersdon to do you any harm, or Pamela either. Whatever her
early history may have been, she has made Tom Hillersdon an excellent
wife, and she has been a very good friend to the poor. I should not
have cared for you to cultivate Mrs. Hillersdon, or the society she
brings round her, at Riverdale—”

“Sir Henry says they have people from the music-halls,” interjected
Pamela, in an awe-stricken voice.

“But if Mrs. Hillersdon likes to come here with her clerical star—”

“Don’t call him a star, George. He is highly gifted, and people have
chosen to make him the fashion, but he is the most single-hearted and
simple-minded man I ever met. No popularity could spoil him. I feel
that if he holds out the hand of friendship to Mrs. Hillersdon, she
must be a good woman.”

“Let her come, Mildred, only don’t let her coming open the door to
intimacy. I would not have my wife the friend of any woman with a
history.”

“And yet there are histories in most lives, George, and there is
sometimes a mystery.”

She could not refrain from this little touch of bitterness, yet she
was sorry the instant she had spoken, deeply penitent, when she saw
the look of pain in the thoughtful face opposite her. Why should she
wilfully wound him, purposely, needlessly, she who so fondly loved him,
whose keenest pain was to think that he had loved any woman upon earth
before he loved her?

“Will you be at home to help me to receive my old friend, George?” she
said, as they rose from the table.

“Yes, I will be at home to welcome Cancellor, and to protect you from
his _protégée’s_ influence, if I can.”

They were all three in the drawing-room when the Riverdale party
arrived. Mildred and Mrs. Hillersdon met in somewise as old
acquaintances, having been thrown together on numerous occasions, at
hunt balls, charity bazaars, and other public assemblies. Pamela was
the only stranger.

Although the scandalous romance of Louise Lorraine’s career was
called ancient history, she was still a beautiful woman. The delicate
features, the pure tones of the alabaster skin, and the large Irish
gray eyes, had been kindly dealt with by time. On the verge of fifty,
Mrs. Hillersdon might have owned only to forty, had she cared so far to
palter with truth. Her charm was, however, now more in a fascinating
personality than in the remains of a once dazzling loveliness. There
was mind in the keen, bright face, with its sharply-cut lines, and
those traces of intellectual wear which give a new grace, instead of
the old one of youthful softness and faultless colouring. The bloom
was gone from the peach, the brilliancy of youth had faded from those
speaking eyes, but there was all the old sweetness of expression which
had made Louise Lorraine’s smile irresistible as the song of the lurlei
in the days that were gone. Her dress was perfect, as it had always
been from the day when she threw away her last cotton stocking, darned
by her own fair hands, and took to dressing like a leader of the great
world, and with perhaps even less concern for cost. She dressed in
perfect harmony with her age and position. Her gown was of softest
black silk, draped with some semi-diaphanous fabric and clouded with
Chantilly lace. Her bonnet was of the same lace and gauze, and her
tapering hand and slender wrist were fitted to perfection in a long
black glove which met a cloud of lace just below the elbow.

At a period when almost every woman who wore black glittered with
beads and bugles from head to foot, Mrs. Hillersdon’s costume was
unembellished by a single ornament. The Parisian milliner had known how
to obey her orders to the letter when she stipulated—_surtout point de
jais_—and the effect was at once distinguished and refined.

Clement Cancellor greeted his old pupil with warm friendliness, and
meekly accepted her reproaches for all those invitations which he had
refused in the past ten years.

“You told me so often that it was impossible for you to come to
Enderby, and yet you can go to my neighbour,” she said.

“My dear Mildred, I went to Riverdale because I was wanted at Romsey.”

“And do you think you were not wanted at Romsey before to-day?—do you
think we should not have been proud to have you preach in our church
here? People would have flocked from far and wide to hear you—yes, even
to Enderby Church—and you might have aided some good work, as you are
going to do to-morrow. How clever of Mrs. Hillersdon to know how to
tempt you down here!”

“You may be sure it is not the first time I have tried, Mrs.
Greswold,” said that lady, with her fascinating smile. “Your influence
would have gone further than mine, I daresay, had you taken half as
much trouble as I have done.”

Mr. Rollinson, the curate of Enderby, was announced at this moment.
The Vicar was a rich man with another parish in his cure, and his own
comfortable vicarage and his brother’s family mansion being adjacent to
the other church, Enderby saw him but seldom, whereby Mr. Rollinson was
a person of much more weight in the parish than the average clerical
subaltern. Mildred liked him for his plain-sailing Christianity and
unfailing kindness to the poor, and she had asked him to tea this
afternoon, knowing that he would like to meet Clement Cancellor.

Castellani looked curiously unlike those three other men, with their
grave countenances and unstudied dress; George Greswold roughly clad
in shooting jacket and knickerbockers; the two priests in well-worn
black. The Italian made a spot of brightness in that sombre assembly,
the sunlight touching his hair and moustache with glints of gold, his
brown velvet coat and light gray trousers suggestive of the studio
rather than of rustic lanes, a gardenia in his button-hole, a valuable
old intaglio fastening his white silk scarf, and withal a half-insolent
look of amusement at those two priests and the sombre-visaged master
of the house. He slipped with serpentine grace to the further side of
the piano, where he contrived his first _tête-à-tête_ with Pamela,
comfortably sheltered by the great Henri Deux vase of gloxinias on the
instrument.

Pamela was shy at first, and would hardly speak; then taking courage,
told him how she had wondered and wept over _Nepenthe_, and thereupon
they began to talk as if they were two kindred souls that had been kept
too long apart by adverse fate, and thrilled with the new delight of
union.

Round the tea-table the conversation was of a graver cast. After a
general discussion of the threatening clouds upon the political and
ecclesiastical horizon, the talk had drifted to a question which at
this time was uppermost in the minds of men. The Deceased Wife’s
Sister’s Bill had been thrown out by the Upper House during the last
session, and everybody had been talking of that debate in which three
princes of the blood royal had been attentive auditors. They had
recorded their vote on the side of liberty of conscience, but in vain.
Time-honoured prejudices had prevailed against modern enlightenment.

Clement Cancellor was a man who would have suffered martyrdom for his
faith; he was generous, he was merciful, gentle, self-sacrificing,
pure in spirit; but he was not liberal-minded. The old shackles hung
heavily upon him. He could not love Wycliffe; and he could not forgive
Cranmer. He was an ecclesiastic after the antique pattern. To him the
marriage of a priest was a base paltering with the lusts of the flesh;
and to him a layman’s marriage with a dead wife’s sister was unholy
and abominable. He had been moved to indignation by the words that
had been spoken and the pamphlets that had been written of late upon
this question; and now, carried away by George Greswold’s denunciation
of that prejudiced majority by which the Bill had been rejected, Mr.
Cancellor gave his indignation full vent, and forgot that he was
speaking in a lady’s drawing-room, and before feminine hearers.

He spoke of such marriages as unholy and immoral, he spoke of such
households as accursed. Mildred listened to him, and watched him
wonderingly, scared at this unfamiliar aspect of his character. To her
he had ever been the gentlest of teachers; she saw him now pallid with
wrath—she heard him breathing words of fire.

George Greswold took up the glove, not because he had ever felt
any particular interest in this question, but because he hated
narrow-minded opinions and clerical prejudices.

“Why should the sister of his wife be different to a man from all other
women?” he asked. “You may call her different—you may set her apart—you
may say she must be to him as his own sister—her beauty must not touch
him, the attractions that fascinate other men must have no influence
over him. You may lay this down as a law—civil—canonical—what you
will—but the common law of nature will override your clerical code,
will burst your shackles of prejudice and tradition. Shall Rachel be
withheld from him who was true and loyal to Leah? She has dwelt in his
house as his friend, the favourite and playmate of his children. He
has respected her as he would have respected any other of his wife’s
girl-friends; but he has seen that she was fair; and if God takes the
wife, and he, remembering the sweetness of that old friendship, and his
children’s love, turns to her as the one woman who can give him back
his lost happiness—is he to be told that this one woman can never be
his, because she was the sister of his first chosen? She has come out
of the same stock whose loyalty he has proved, she would bring to his
hearth all the old sweet associations—”

“And she would _not_ bring him a second mother-in-law. What a
stupendous superiority she would have _there_!” interjected the jovial
Rollinson, who had been wallowing in hot-buttered cakes and strong tea,
until his usually roseate visage had become startlingly rubicund.

He was in all things the opposite of the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He
wrote poetry, made puns, played billiards, dined out at all the houses
in the neighbourhood that were worth dining at, and was only waiting
to marry until Tom Hillersdon should be able to give him a living.

Mr. Cancellor reproved the ribald jester with a scathing look before he
took up the argument against his host.

“If this Bill were to pass, no virtuous woman could live in the house
of a married sister,” he said.

“That is as much as to say that no honest woman can live in the house
of any married man,” retorted Greswold hotly. “Do you think if a man is
weak enough to fall in love with another woman under his wife’s roof
he is less likely to sin because your canonical law stares him in the
face, telling him, ‘Thou canst never wed her’? The married man who is
inconstant to his wife is not influenced by the chances of the future.
He is either a bold, bad man, whose only thought is to win the woman
whom he loves at any cost of honour or conscience; or he is a weak
fool, who drifts hopelessly to destruction, and in whom the resolution
of to-day yields to the temptation of to-morrow. Neither the bold
sinner nor the weak one is influenced by the consideration whether he
can or cannot marry the woman he loves under the unlikely circumstance
of his wife’s untimely death. The man who does so calculate is the
one man in so many thousands of men who will poison his wife to clear
the way for his new fancy. I don’t think we ought to legislate for
poisoners. In plain words, if a married man is weak enough or wicked
enough to be seduced by the charms of any woman who dwells beneath his
roof, he will not be the less likely to fall because the law of the
land has made that woman anathema maranatha, or because he has been
warned from the pulpit that she is to be to him as his own flesh and
blood, no dearer and no less dear than the sister beside whom he grew
from infancy to manhood, and whom he has loved all his life, hardly
knowing whether she is as beautiful as Hebe or as hideous as Tisyphone.”

“You are a disciple of the New Learning, Mr. Greswold,” Cancellor said
bitterly; “the learning which breaks down all barriers and annihilates
the Creator of all things—the learning which has degraded God from
infinite power to infinitesimal insignificance, and which explains the
genius of Plato and Shakespeare, Luther and Newton, as the ultimate
outcome of an unconscious primeval mist.”

“I am no Darwinian,” replied Greswold coldly, “but I would rather
belong to his school of speculative inquiry than to the Calvinism which
slew Servetus, or the Romanism which lit the death-pile of the Oxford
martyrs.”

Mildred was not more anxious than Mrs. Hillersdon to end a discussion
which threatened angry feeling. They looked at each other in an agony,
and then with a sudden inspiration Mildred exclaimed,

“If we could only persuade Mr. Castellani to play to us! We are growing
so terribly serious;” and then she went to Clement Cancellor, who was
standing by the open window, and took her place beside him, while Mrs.
Hillersdon talked with Pamela and Castellani at the piano. “You know
what a privilege it is to _me_ always to hear you talk,” she murmured
in her sweet, subdued voice. “You know how I have followed your
teaching in all things. And be assured my husband is no materialist.
We both cling to the old faith, the old hopes, the old promises. You
must not misjudge him because of a single difference of opinion.”

“Forgive me, my dear Mildred,” replied Cancellor, touched by her
submission. “I did wrong to be angry. I know that to many good
Christians this question of marriage with a sister-in-law is a
stumbling-block. I have taken the subject too deeply to heart
perhaps—I, to whom marriage altogether seems outside the Christian
priest’s horizon. Perhaps I may exaggerate the peril of a wider
liberty; but I, who look upon Henry VIII. as the arch-enemy of the
one vital Church—of which he might have been the wise and enlightened
reformer—I, who trace to his unhallowed union with his brother’s widow
all the after evils of his career—must needs lift up my voice against a
threatened danger.”

Castellani began Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” with a triumphant burst
that sounded like mockery. Do what the preacher might to assimilate
earth to heaven, here there would still be marrying and giving in
marriage.

After the march Mildred went over to the piano and asked Castellani to
sing.

He smiled assent, and played the brief symphony to a ballad of Heine’s,
set by Jensen. The exquisite tenor voice, the perfect taste of the
singer, held his audience spellbound. They listened in silence, and
entreated him to sing again, and then again, till he had sung four of
these jewel-like ballads, and they felt that it was impertinence to ask
for more.

Mildred had stolen round to her own sheltered corner, half hidden by
a group of tall palms. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap,
her head bent. She could not see the singer. She only heard the low
pathetic voice, slightly veiled. It touched her like no other voice
that she had ever heard since, in her girlhood, she burst into a
passion of sobs at first hearing Sims Reeves, when that divine voice
touched some hyper-sensitive chord in her own organisation and moved
her almost to hysteria. And now, in this voice of the man who of all
other men she instinctively disliked, the same tones touched the same
chord, and loosened the floodgates of her tears. She sat with streaming
eyes, grateful for the sheltering foliage which screened her from
observation.

She dried her eyes and recovered herself with difficulty when the
singer rose from the piano and Mrs. Hillersdon began to take leave. Mr.
Rollinson button-holed Castellani on the instant.

“You sing as if you had just come from the seraphic choir,” he said.
“You must sing for us on the seventh.”

“Who are ‘us’?” asked Castellani.

“Our concert in aid of the fund for putting a Burne-Jones window over
the altar.”

“A concert in Enderby village? Is it to be given at the lock-up or in
the pound?”

“It is to be given in this room. Mrs. Greswold has been good enough
to allow us the use of her drawing-room and her piano. Miss Ransome
promises to preside at the buffet for tea and coffee.”

“It will be glorious fun,” exclaimed Pamela; “I shall feel like a
barmaid. I have always envied barmaids.”

“Daudet says there is one effulgent spot in every man’s life—one
supreme moment when he stands on the mountain-top of fortune and
of bliss, and from which all the rest of his existence is a gradual
descent. I wonder whether that afternoon will be your effulgent spot,
Miss Ransome?” said Mrs. Hillersdon laughingly.

“It will—it must. To superintend two great urns of tea and
coffee—_almost_ as nice as those delicious beer-engines one sees at
Salisbury Station—to charge people a shilling for a small cup of tea,
and sixpence for a penny sponge-cake. What splendid fun!”

“Will you help us, Mr. Castleton?” asked the curate, who was not good
at names.

“Mrs. Greswold has only to command me. I am in all things her slave.”

“Then she will command you—she does command you,” cried the curate.

“If you will be so very kind—” began Mildred.

“I am only too proud to obey you,” answered Castellani, with more
earnestness than the occasion required, drawing a little nearer to
Mildred as he spoke; “only too glad of an excuse to return to this
house.”

Mildred looked at him with a half-frightened expression, and then
glanced at Pamela. Did he mean mischief of some kind? Was this the
beginning of an insidious pursuit of that frank girl, whose fortune was
quite enough to tempt the casual adventurer?

“Of all men I have ever seen he is the last to whom I would entrust a
girl’s fate,” thought Mildred, determined to be very much on her guard
against the blandishments of César Castellani.

She took the very worst means to ward off danger. She made the direful
mistake of warning the girl against the possible pursuer that very
evening when they were sitting alone after dinner.

“He is a man I could never trust,” she said.

“No more could I,” replied Pamela; “but O, how exquisitely he sings!”
and excited at the mere memory of that singing, she ran to the piano
and began to pick out the melody of Heine’s “Ich weiss nicht was soll
es bedeuten,” and sang the words softly in her girlish voice; and then
slipped away from the piano with a nervous little laugh.

“Upon my word, Aunt Mildred, I am _traurig_ myself at the very thought
of that exquisite song,” she said. “What a gift it is to sing like
that! How I wish _I_ were César Castellani!”

“What, when we have both agreed that he is not a good man?”

“Who cares about being _good_?” exclaimed Pamela, beside herself;
“three-fourths of the people of this world are good. But to be able to
write a book that can unsettle every one’s religion; to be able to make
everybody miserable when one sings! Those are gifts that place a man
on a level with the Greek gods. If I were Mr. Castellani I should feel
like Mercury or Apollo.”

“Pamela, you frighten me when you rave like that. Remember that, for
all we know to the contrary, this man may be a mere adventurer, and in
every way dangerous.”

“Why should we think him an adventurer? He told me all about himself.
He told me that his grandfather was under obligations to your
grandfather. He told me about his father, the composer, who wrote
operas which are known all over Italy, and who died young, like Mozart
and Mendelssohn. Genius is hereditary with him; he was suckled upon
art. I have no doubt he is bad, irretrievably bad,” said Pamela, with
unction; “but don’t try to persuade me that he is a vulgar adventurer
who would try to borrow five-pound notes, or a fortune-hunter who would
try to marry one for one’s money,” concluded the girl, falling back
upon her favourite form of speech.




CHAPTER XIV.

LIFTING THE CURTAIN.


The charity concert afforded César Castellani just the necessary
excuse for going to Enderby Manor House as often as he liked, and for
staying there as long as he liked. He was now on a familiar footing.
He drove or rode over from Riverdale nearly every day during the three
weeks that intervened between Mr. Cancellor’s sermon and the afternoon
concert. He made himself the curate’s right hand in all the details of
the entertainment. He chose the music, he wrote the programme, he sent
it to his favourite printer to be printed in antique type upon ribbed
paper with ragged edges: a perfect gem in the way of a programme. He
scoured the country round in quest of amateur talent, and was much more
successful than the curate had been in the same quest.

“I’m astounded at your persuading Lady Millborough to show in the
daylight,” said Rollinson, laughing. “You have the tongue of the
serpent to overcome her objection to the glare of the afternoon sun.”

“_Estote prudentes sicuti serpentes_,” said Castellani. “There’s a fine
old ecclesiastic’s motto for you. I know Lady Millborough rather dreads
the effect of sunlight upon her _nacre Bernhardt_. She told me that
she was never equal to singing in the afternoon: the glare of the sun
always gave her a headache. But I assured her in the first place that
there should be no glare—that as an artist I abhorred a crude, white
light—and that it should be my business to see that our concert-room
was lighted upon purely æsthetic principles. We would have the dim
religious light which painters and poets love. In the second place I
assured her that she had as fine a contralto as Madame Alboni, on whose
knees I had often sat as a child, and who gave me the emerald pin I was
wearing.”

“My hat, what a man you are!” exclaimed Rollinson. “But do you mean to
say we are to give our concert in the dark?”

“We will not have the afternoon sun blinding half our audience.
We will have the auditorium in a cool twilight, and we will have
lamp-light on our platform—just that mellow and flattering light in
which elderly women look young and young women angelic.”

“We’ll leave everything to you,” cried the curate. “I think we ought to
leave him free scope; ought we not, Mrs. Greswold?”

Mildred assented. Pamela was enthusiastic. This concert was to be one
of the events of her life. Castellani had discovered that she possessed
a charming mezzo-soprano. She was to sing a duet with him. O, what
rapture! A duet of his own composition, all about roses and love and
death.

    “’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
       If I had but lived for thee;
     A life as long as the nightingale’s song
       Were enough for my heart and me.”

The words and the voices were interwoven in a melodious web; tenor and
soprano entwined together—following and ever following like the phrases
in an anthem.

The preparation of this one duet alone obliged Mr. Castellani to be
nearly every day at Enderby. A musician has inexhaustible patience in
teaching his own music. Castellani hammered at every bar and every note
with Pamela. He did not hesitate at unpleasant truth. She had received
the most expensive instruction from a well-known singing-master, and,
according to Castellani, everything she had been taught was wrong. “If
you had been left alone to sing as the birds sing you would be ever so
much better off,” he said; “the man has murdered a very fine organ. If
I had had the teaching of you, you would have sung as well as Trebelli
by this time.”

Pamela thrilled at the thought. O, to sing like some great singer—to
be able to soar skyward on the wings of music—to sing as _he_ sang!
She had known him a fortnight by this time, and was deeply in love
with him. In moments of confidence by the piano he called her Pamela,
treating her almost as if she were a child, yet with a touch of
gallantry always—an air that said, “You are beautiful, dear child, and
you know it; but I have lived my life.” Before Mrs. Greswold he was
more formal, and called her Miss Ransome.

All barriers were down now between Riverdale and the Manor. Mrs.
Hillersdon was going to make an extra large house-party on purpose
to patronise the concert. It was to be on the 7th of September: the
partridge-shooting would be in full swing, and the shooters assembled.
Mrs. Greswold had been to tea at Riverdale. There seemed to be no help
for it, and George Greswold was apparently indifferent.

“My dearest, your purity of mind will be in no danger from Mrs.
Hillersdon. Even were she still Louise Lorraine, she could not harm
you—and you know I am not given to consider the _qu’on dire t’on_ in
such a case. Let her come here by all means, so long as she is not
obnoxious to you.”

“She is far from that. I think she has the most delightful manners of
any woman I ever met.”

“So, no doubt, had Circe, yet she changed men into swine.”

“Mr. Cancellor would not believe in her if she were not a good woman.”

“I should set a higher value on Cancellor’s opinion if he were more of
a man of the world, and less of a bigot. See what nonsense he talked
about the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill.”

“Nonsense! O, George, if you knew how it distressed me to hear you take
the other side—the unchristian side!”

“I can find no word of Christ’s against such marriages, and the Church
of old was always ready with a dispensation for any such union, if it
was made worth the Church’s while to be indulgent. It was the earnest
desire of the Roman Catholic world that Philip should marry Elizabeth.
You are Cancellor’s pupil, Mildred, and I cannot wonder if he has made
you something of a bigot.”

“He is the noblest and most unselfish of men.”

“I admit his unselfishness—the purity of his intentions—the tenderness
of his heart; but I deny his nobility. Ecclesiastic narrow-mindedness
spoils a character that might have been perfect had it been less
hampered by tradition. Cancellor is a couple of centuries behind the
time. His Church is the Church of Laud.”

“I thought you admired and loved him, George,” said Mildred
regretfully.

“I admire his good qualities, I love him for his thoroughness; but our
creeds are wide apart. I cannot even pretend to think as he thinks.”

This confession increased Mildred’s sadness. She would have had her
husband think as she thought, believe as she believed, in all spiritual
things. The beloved child they had lost was waiting for them in heaven;
and she would fain that they should both tread the same path to that
better world where there would be no more tears, no more death—where
day and night would be alike in the light of the great Throne. She
shuddered at the thought of any difference of creed on her husband’s
part, shuddered at that beginning of divergence which might end in
infidelity. She had been educated by Clement Cancellor, and she
thought as he thought. It seemed to her that she was surrounded by an
atmosphere of doubt. In the books she read among the more cultivated
people whom she met, she found the same tendency to speculative
infidelity, pessimism, Darwinism, sociology, Pantheism, anything but
Christian belief. The nearest approach to religious feeling seemed to
be found in the theosophists, with their last fashionable Oriental
improvements upon the teaching of Christ.

Clement Cancellor had trained her in the belief that there was one
Church, one creed, one sovereign rule of life, outside which rigid
boundary-line lay the dominion of Satan. And now, seeing her husband’s
antagonism to her pastor upon this minor point of the marriage law, she
began to ask herself whether those two might not stand as widely apart
upon graver questions—whether George Greswold might not be one of those
half-hearted Christians who attend their parish church and keep Sunday
sacred because it is well to set a good example to their neighbours
and dependants, while their own faith is little more than a memory of
youthful beliefs, the fading reflection of a sun that has sunk below
the horizon.

She had discovered her husband capable of a suppression of truth that
was almost as bad as falsehood; and now having begun to doubt his
conscientiousness, it was not unnatural that she should begin to doubt
his religious feeling.

“Had he been as deeply religious as I thought him, he would not have so
deceived me,” she told herself, still brooding upon that mystery of
his first marriage.

Castellani’s presence in the house was a continual irritation to her.
It tortured her to think that he knew more of her husband’s past life
than was known to her. She longed to question him, yet refrained,
feeling that there would be unspeakable meanness, treachery even, in
obtaining any information about her husband’s past life except from his
own lips. He had chosen to keep silence, he who could so easily have
explained all things; and it was her duty to submit.

She tried to be interested in the concert, which involved a good
deal of work for herself, as she was to play all the accompaniments,
the piano part in a concertante duet by De Bériot with an amateur
violin player, and a Hungarian march by a modern classic by way of
overture. There were rehearsals nearly every day, with much talk and
tea-drinking. Enderby Manor seemed given over to bustle and gaiety—that
grave old house, which to her mind ought to have been silent as a
sepulchre, now that Lola’s voice could sound there never more, except
in dreams.

“People must think I am forgetting her,” she said to herself with a
sigh, when half-a-dozen carriages had driven away from the door, after
two hours of bustle and confusion, much discussion as to the choice
of songs and the arrangement of the programme, which everybody wanted
different.

“I cannot possibly sing ‘The Three Fishers’ after Captain Scobell’s
‘Wanderer,’” protested Lady Millborough. “It would never do to have two
dismal songs in succession.”

Yet when it was proposed that her ladyship’s song should succeed Mr.
Rollinson’s admirable rendering of George Grossmith’s “He was such a
Careless Man,” she distinctly refused to sing immediately after a comic
song.

“I am not going to take the taste of Mr. Rollinson’s vulgarity out of
people’s mouths,” she told Mildred, in an audible aside.

To these God-gifted vocalists the accompanist was as an inferior being,
a person with a mere mechanical gift of playing anything set before her
with taste and style. They treated her as if she had been a machine.

“If you wouldn’t mind going over our duet just once more, I think
we should feel more comfortable in it,” said one of the two Miss
Tadcasters, who were to take the roof off, metaphorically, in the Norma
duet.

Mildred toiled with unwavering good-nature, and suppressed her shudders
at many a false note, and cast oil on the waters when the singers were
inclined to quarrel. She was glad of the drudgery that kept her fingers
and her mind occupied; she was glad of any distraction that changed the
current of her thoughts.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the day before the concert. César Castellani had established
himself as _l’ami de la maison_, a person who had the right to come in
and out as he liked, whose coming and going made no difference to the
master of the house. Had George Greswold’s mind been less abstracted
from the business of every-day life he might have seen danger to Pamela
Ransome’s peace of mind in the frequent presence of the Italian, and
he might have considered it his duty, as the young lady’s kinsman, to
have restricted Mr. Castellani’s privileges. But the blow which had
crushed George Greswold’s heart a little more than a year ago had left
him in somewise a broken man. He had lost all interest in the common
joys and occupations of every-day life. His days were spent for the
most part in long walks or rides in the loneliest places he could find,
his only evening amusement was found in books, and those books of a
kind which engrossed his attention and took him out of himself. His
wife’s companionship was always precious to him; but their intercourse
had lost all its old gaiety and much of the old familiarity. There
was an indefinable something which held them asunder even when they
were sitting in the same room, or pacing side by side, just as of old,
upon the lawn in front of the drawing-room, or idling in their summer
parlour in the shade of the cedars.

Again and again in the last three weeks some question about the past
had trembled upon Mildred’s lips as she sat at work by the piano where
Castellani played in dreamy idleness, wandering from one master to
another, or extemporising after his own capricious fancies. Again and
again she had struggled against the temptation and had conquered. No,
she would not stoop to a meanness. She would not be disloyal to her
husband by so much as one idle question.

To-day Castellani was in high spirits, proud of to-morrow’s anticipated
success, in which his own exertions would count for much. He sat at the
piano in a leisure hour after tea. All the performers had gone, after
the final adjustment of every detail. Mildred sat idle with her head
resting against the cushion of a high-backed armchair, exhausted by the
afternoon’s labours. Pamela stood by the piano watching and listening
delightedly as Castellani improvised.

“I will give you my musical transcript of St. Partridge Day,” he said,
smiling down at the notes as he played a lively melody with little
rippling runs in the treble and crisp staccato chords in the bass.
“This is morning, and all the shooters are on tip-toe with delight—a
misty morning,” gliding into a dreamy legato movement as he spoke. “You
can scarcely see the hills yonder, and the sun is not yet up. See
there he leaps above that bank of purple cloud, and all is brightness,”
changing to crashing chords in the bass and brilliant arpeggios in the
treble. “Hark! there is chanticleer. How shrill he peals in the morning
air! The dogs are leaving the kennel—and now the gates are open, dogs
and men are in the road. You can hear the steady tramp of the clumsy
shooting-boots—your dreadful English boots—and the merry music of the
dogs. Pointers, setters, spaniels, smooth beasts and curly beasts,
shaking the dew from the hedgerows as they scramble along the banks,
flying over the ditches—creatures of lightning swiftness; yes, even
those fat heavy spaniels which seem made to sprawl and snap at flies in
the sunshine or snore beside the fire.”

He talked in brief snatches, playing all the time—playing with the
easy brilliancy, the unerring grace of one to whom music is a native
tongue—as natural a mode of thought-expression as speech itself. His
father had trained him to improvise, weaving reminiscences of all his
favourite composers into those dreamy reveries. They had sat side by
side, father and son, each following the bent of his own fancy, yet
quick to adapt it to the other, now leading, now following. They had
played together as Moscheles and Mendelssohn used to play, delighting
in each other’s caprices.

“I hope I don’t bore you very much,” said Castellani, looking up at
Mildred as she sat silent, the fair face and pale gold hair defined
against the olive brocade of the chair cushion.

He looked up at her in wondering admiration, as at a beautiful picture.
How lovely she was, with a loveliness that grew upon him, and took
possession of his fancy and his senses with a strengthening hold day by
day. It was a melancholy loveliness, the beauty of a woman whose life
had come to a dead stop, in whose breast hope and love were dead—or
dormant.

“Not dead,” he told himself, “only sleeping. Whose shall be the spell
to awaken the sleepers. Who shall be the Orpheus to bring this sweet
Eurydice from the realms of Death?”

Such thoughts were in his mind as he sat looking at her, waiting for
her answer, playing all the while, telling her how fair she was in the
tenderest variations of an old German air whose every note breathed
passionate love.

“How sweet!” murmured Pamela; “what an exquisite melody!” taking some
of the sweetness to herself. “How could such sweetness weary any one
with the ghost of an ear? You are not bored by it, are you, aunt?”

“Bored? no, it is delightful,” answered Mildred, rousing herself from a
reverie. “My thoughts went back to my childhood while you were playing.
I never knew but one other person who had that gift of improvisation,
and she used to play to me when I was a child. She was almost a child
herself, and of course she was very inferior to you as a pianist; but
she would sit and play to me for an hour in the twilight, inventing
new melodies, or playing recollections of old melodies, describing in
music. The old fairy tales are for ever associated with music in my
mind, because of those memories. I believe she was highly gifted in
music.”

“Music of a high order is not an uncommon gift among women of sensitive
temperament,” said Castellani musingly. “I take it to be only another
name for sympathy. Want of musical feeling is want of sympathy.
Shakespeare knew that when he declared the non-musical man to be by
nature a villain. I could no more imagine _you_ without the gift of
music than I could imagine the stars without the quality of light. Mr.
Greswold’s first wife was a good musician, as no doubt you know.”

“You heard her play—and sing?” faltered Mildred, avoiding a direct
reply.

The sudden mention of her dead rival’s name had quickened the beating
of her heart. She had longed to question him and had refrained; and
now, without any act of hers, he had spoken, and she was going to hear
something about that woman whose existence was a mystery to her, whose
Christian name she had never heard.

“Yes, I heard her several times at parties at Nice. She was much
admired for her musical talents. She was not a grand singer, but she
had been well taught, and she had exquisite taste, and knew exactly the
kind of music that suited her best. She was one of the attractions at
the Palais Montano, where one heard only the best music.”

“I think you said the other day that you did not meet her often,”
said Mildred. “My husband could hardly have forgotten you had you met
frequently.”

“I can scarcely say that we met frequently, and our meetings were
such as Mr. Greswold would not be very likely to remember. I am not a
remarkable man now, and I was a very insignificant person fifteen years
ago. I was only asked to people’s houses because I could sing a little,
and because my father had a reputation in the South as a composer.
I was never introduced to your husband, but I was presented to his
wife—as a precocious youth with some pretensions to a tenor voice—and I
found her very charming—after her own particular style.”

“Was she a beautiful woman?” asked Mildred. “I—I—have never talked
about her to my husband, she died so young, and—”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Castellani, as she hesitated.
“Of course you would not speak of her. There are things that cannot
be spoken about. There is always a skeleton in every life—not more in
Mr. Greswold’s past than in that of other people, perhaps, could we
know all histories. I was wrong to speak of her. Her name escaped me
unawares.”

“Pray don’t apologise,” said Mildred, indignant at something in his
tone, which hinted at wrong-doing on her husband’s part. “There can
be no reason why you should keep silence—to me; though any mention of
an old sorrow might wound him. I know my husband too well not to know
that he must have behaved honourably in every relation of life—before I
married him as well as afterwards. I only asked a very simple question:
was my predecessor as beautiful as she was gifted?”

“No. She was charming, piquant, elegant, spirituelle, but she was not
handsome. I think she was conscious of that want of beauty, and that it
made her sensitive, and even bitter. I have heard her say hard things
of women who were handsomer than herself. She had a scathing tongue
and a capricious temper, and she was not a favourite with her own sex,
though she was very much admired by clever men. I know that as a lad I
thought her one of the brightest women I had ever met.”

“It was sad that she should die so young,” said Mildred.

She would not for worlds that this man should know the extent of her
ignorance about the woman who had borne her husband’s name. She spoke
vaguely, hoping that he would take it for granted she knew all.

“Yes,” assented Castellani with a sigh, “her death was infinitely sad.”

He spoke as of an event of more than common sadness—a calamity that had
been in somewise more tragical than untimely death must needs be.

Mildred kept silence, though her heart ached with shapeless
forebodings, and though it would have been an unspeakable relief to
know the worst rather than to feel the oppression of this mystery.

Castellani rose to take leave. He was paler than he had been before the
conversation began, and he had a troubled air. Pamela looked at him
with sympathetic distress. “I am afraid you are dreadfully tired,” she
said, as they shook hands.

“I am never tired in this house,” he answered; and Pamela appropriated
the compliment by her vivid blush.

Mildred shook hands with him mechanically and in silence. She was
hardly conscious of his leaving the room. She rose and went out into
the garden, while Pamela sat down to the piano and began singing her
part in the everlasting duet. She never sang anything else nowadays. It
was a perpetual carol of admiration for the author of _Nepenthe_.

    “’Twere sweet to die as the roses die,
       If I had but lived for thee;
     ’Twere sweet to fade as the twilight fades
       Over the western sea,”

she warbled, while Mildred paced slowly to and fro in front of the
cedars, brooding over every word Castellani had spoken about her
husband’s first wife.

“Her death was infinitely sad.”

Why infinitely? The significance of the word troubled her. It conjured
up all manner of possibilities. Why infinitely sad? All death is
sad. The death of the young especially so. But to say even of a
young wife’s death that it was infinitely sad would seem to lift it
out of the region of humanity’s common doom. That qualifying word
hinted at a tragical fate rather than a young life cut short by any
ordinary malady. There had been something in Castellani’s manner which
accentuated the meaning of his words. That troubled look, that deep
sigh, that hurried departure, all hinted at a painful story which he
knew and did not wish to reveal.

He had in a manner apologised for speaking of George Greswold’s first
wife. There must have been a reason for that. He was not a man to
say meaningless things out of _gaucherie_; not a man to blunder and
equivocate from either shyness or stupidity. He had implied that Mr.
Greswold was not likely to talk about his first marriage—that he would
naturally avoid any allusion to his first wife.

Why naturally? Why should he not speak of that past life? Men are not
ordinarily reticent upon such subjects. And that a man should suppress
the fact of a first marriage altogether would suggest memories so dark
as to impel an honourable man to stoop to a tacit lie rather than face
the horror of revelation.

She walked up and down that fair stretch of velvet turf upon which
her feet had trodden so lightly in the happy years that were gone—gone
never to be recalled, as it seemed to her, carrying with them all that
she had ever known of domestic peace, of wedded bliss. Never again
could they two be as they had been. The mystery of the past had risen
up between them—like some hooded phantom, a vaguely threatening figure,
a hidden face—to hold them apart for evermore.

“If he had only trusted me,” she thought despairingly, “there is hardly
any sin that I would not have forgiven for love of him. Why could he
not believe in my love well enough to know that I should judge him
leniently—if there had been wrong-doing on his side—if—if—”

She had puzzled over that hidden past, trying to penetrate the
darkness, imagining the things that might have happened—infidelity on
the wife’s part—infidelity on the husband’s side—another and fatal
attachment taking the place of loyal love. Sin of some kind there
must have been, she thought; for such dark memories could scarcely be
sinless. But was husband or wife the sinner?

“Her death was infinitely sad.”

That sentence stood out against the dark background of mystery as if
written in fire. That one fact was absolute. George Greswold’s first
wife had died under circumstances of peculiar sadness; so painful that
Castellani’s countenance grew pale and troubled at the very thought of
her death.

“I cannot endure it,” Mildred thought at last, in an agony of doubt.
“I will not suffer this torture for another day. I will appeal to him.
I will question him. If he values my love and my esteem he will answer
faithfully. It must be painful for him, painful for me; but it will be
far better for us both in the long-run. Anything will be better than
these torturing fears. I am his wife, and I have a right to know the
truth.”

The dressing-gong summoned her back to the house. Her husband was in
the drawing-room half-an-hour afterwards, when she went down to dinner.
He was still in his jacket and knickerbockers, just as he had come in
from a long ramble.

“Will you forgive me if I dine with you in these clothes, Mildred,
and you, Pamela?” to the damsel in white muslin, whom he had just
surprised at the piano still warbling her honeyed strain about death
and the roses; “I came in five minutes ago—dead beat. I have been in
the forest, and had a tramp with the deerhounds over Bramble Hill.”

“You walk too far, George. You are looking dreadfully tired.”

“I’m sure you needn’t apologise for your dress on my account,”
said Pamela. “Henry is a perfect disgrace half his time. He hates
evening-clothes, and I sometimes fear he hates soap-and-water. He
can reconcile his conscience to any amount of dirt so long as he has
his cold tub in the morning. He thinks that one sacrifice to decency
justifies anything. I have had to sit next him at dinner when he came
straight from rats,” concluded Pamela, with a shudder. “But Rosalind is
so foolishly indulgent. She would spoil twenty husbands.”

“And you, I suppose, would be a martinet to one?” said Greswold,
smiling at the girl’s animated face.

“It would depend. If I were married to an artist I could forgive any
neglect of the proprieties. One does not expect a man of that kind to
be the slave of conventionalities; but a commonplace person like Sir
Henry Mountford has nothing to recommend him but his tailor.”

They went to dinner, and Pamela’s prattle relieved the gloom which had
fallen upon husband and wife. George Greswold saw that there were signs
of a new trouble in his wife’s face. He sat for nearly an hour alone
with the untouched decanters before him, and with Kassandra’s head upon
his knee. The dog always knew when his thoughts were darkest, and would
not be repulsed at such times. She was not obtrusive: she only wanted
to bear him company.

It was nearly ten o’clock when he left the dining-room. He looked in at
the drawing-room door, and saw his wife and his niece sitting at work,
silent both.

“I am going to the library to write some letters, Mildred,” he said:
“don’t sit up for me.”

She rose quickly and went over to him.

“Let me have half-an-hour’s talk with you first, George,” she said, in
an earnest voice: “I want so much to speak to you.”

“My dearest, I am always at your service,” he answered quietly; and
they went across the hall together, to that fine old room which was
essentially the domain of the master of the house.

It was a large room with three long narrow windows—unaltered from
the days of Queen Anne—looking out to the carriage-drive in the
front of the house, and the walls were lined with books, in severely
architectural bookcases. There was a lofty marble chimneypiece, richly
decorated, and in front of the fireplace there was an old-fashioned
knee-hole desk, at which Mr. Greswold was wont to sit. There was a
double reading-lamp ready-lighted for him upon this desk, and there
was no other light in the room. By this dim light the sombre colouring
of oak bookcases and maroon velvet window-curtains deepened to black.
The spacious room had almost a funereal aspect, like that awful
banqueting-hall to which Domitian invited his parasites and straightway
frightened them to death.

“Well, Mildred, what is the matter?” asked Greswold, when his wife had
seated herself beside him in front of the massive oak desk at which
all the business of his estate had been transacted since he came to
Enderby. “There is nothing amiss, love, I hope, to make you so earnest?”

“There is something very much amiss, George,” she answered. “Forgive me
if I pain you by what I have to say—by the questions I am going to ask.
I cannot help giving you pain, truly and dearly as I love you. I cannot
go on suffering as I have suffered since that wretched Sunday afternoon
when I discovered how you had deceived me—you whom I so trusted, so
honoured as the most upright among men.”

“It is a little hard that you should say I deceived you, Mildred. I
suppressed one fact which had no bearing upon my relations with you.”

“You must have signed your name to a falsehood in the register, if you
described yourself as a bachelor.”

“I did not so describe myself. I confided the fact of my first marriage
to your father on the eve of our wedding. I told him why I had been
silent—told him that my past life had been steeped in bitterness. He
was generous enough to accept my confidence and to ask no questions.
My bride was too shy and too agitated to observe what I wrote in the
register, or else she might have noted the word ‘widower’ after my
name.”

“Thank God you did not sign your name to a lie,” said Mildred, with a
sigh of relief.

“I am sorry my wife of fourteen years should think me capable of
falsehood on the document that sealed my fate with hers.”

“O, George, I know how true you are—how true and upright you have
been in every word and act of your life since we two have been one.
It is not in my nature to misjudge you. I cannot think you capable of
wrong-doing to any one under strongest temptation. I cannot believe
that Fate could set such a snare for you as could entrap you into one
dishonourable act; but I am tortured by the thought of a past life of
which I know nothing. Why did you hide your marriage from me when we
were lovers? Why are you silent and secret now, when I am your wife,
the other half of yourself, ready to sympathise with you, to share the
burden of dark memories? Trust me, George. Trust me, dear love, and
let us be again as we have been, united in every thought.”

“You do not know what you are asking me, Mildred,” said George
Greswold, in his deep, grave voice, looking at her with haggard
reproachful eyes. “You cannot measure the torture you are inflicting by
this aimless curiosity.”

“You cannot measure the agony of doubt which I have suffered since I
knew that you loved another woman before you loved me—loved her so well
that you cannot bear even to speak of that past life which you lived
with her—regret her so intensely that now, after fourteen years of
wedded life with me, the mere memory of that lost love can plunge you
into gloom and despair,” said Mildred passionately.

That smothered fire of jealousy which had been smouldering in her
breast for weeks broke out all at once in impetuous speech. She no
longer cared what she said. Her only thought was that the dead love had
been dearer than the living, that she had been cozened by a lover whose
heart had never been wholly hers.

“You are very cruel, Mildred,” her husband answered quietly. “You are
probing an old wound, and a deep one, to the quick. You wrong yourself
more than you wrong me by causeless jealousy and unworthy doubts. Yes,
I did conceal the fact of my first marriage—not because I had loved
my wife too well, but because I had not loved her well enough. I was
silent about a period of my life which was one of intense misery—which
it was my duty to myself to forget, if it were possible to forget—which
it was perilous to remember. My only chance of happiness—or peace of
mind—lay in oblivion of that bitter time. It was only when I loved
you that I began to believe forgetfulness was possible. I courted
oblivion by every means in my power. I told myself that the man who
had so suffered was a man who had ceased to exist. George Ransome
was dead. George Greswold stood on the threshold of a new life, with
infinite capacities for happiness. I told myself that I might be a
beloved and honoured husband—which I had never been—a useful member
of society—which I had not been hitherto. Until that hour all things
had been against me. With you for my wife all things would be in my
favour. For thirteen happy years this promise of our marriage morning
was fully realised; then came our child’s death; and now comes your
estrangement.”

“I am not estranged, George. It is only my dread of the beginning of
estrangement which tortures me. Since that man spoke of your first
wife, I have brooded perpetually upon that hidden past. It is weak, I
know, to have done so. I ought to trust unquestioningly: but I cannot,
I cannot. I love you too well to love without jealousy.”

“Well, let the veil be lifted then, since it must be so. Ask what
questions you please, and I will answer them—as best I can.”

“You are very good,” she faltered, drawing a little nearer to him,
leaning her head against his shoulder as she talked to him, and laying
her hand on his as it lay before him on the desk, tightly clenched.
“Tell me, dear, were you happy with your first wife?”

“I was not.”

“Not even in the beginning?”

“Hardly in the beginning. It was an ill-advised union, the result of
impulse.”

“But she loved you very dearly, perhaps.”

“She loved me—dearly—after her manner of loving.”

“And you did not love her?”

“It is a cruel thing you force me to say, Mildred. No, I did not love
her.”

“Had you been married long when she died?”

She felt a quivering movement in the clenched hand on which her own lay
caressingly, and she heard him draw a long and deep breath.

“About a year.”

“Her death was a sad one, I know. Did she go out of her mind before she
died?”

“No.”

“Did she leave you—or do you any great wrong?”

“No.”

“Were you false to her, George—O, forgive me, forgive me—but there must
have been something more sad than common sadness, and it might be that
some new and fatal love—”

“There was no such thing,” he answered sternly. “I was true to my
duties as a husband. It was not a long trial—only a year. Even a
profligate might keep faith for so short a span.”

“I see you will not confide in me. I will ask no more questions,
George. That kind of catechism will not make us more in sympathy with
each other. I will ask you nothing more—except—just one question—a
woman’s question. Was your first wife beautiful in your eyes.”

“She was not beautiful; but she was intellectual, and she had an
interesting countenance—a face that attracted me at first sight. It was
even more attractive to me than the faces of handsomer women. But if
you want to know what your fancied rival was like you need not languish
in ignorance,” with some touch of scorn. “I have her photograph in this
desk. I have kept it for my days of humiliation, to remind me of what I
have been and what I may be again. Would you like to see it?”

“Yes, George, if it will not pain you too much to show it to me.”

“Do not talk of pain. You have stirred the waters of Marah so deeply
that one more bitter drop cannot signify.” He unlocked his desk as he
spoke, lifted the lid, which was sustained by a movable upright, and
groped among the accumulation of papers and parchments inside.

The object for which he was seeking was at the back of the desk, under
all the papers. He found it by touch: a morocco case containing a
cabinet photograph. Mildred stood up beside him, with one hand on his
shoulder as he searched.

He handed her the case without a word. She opened it in silence and
looked at the portrait within. A small, delicately-featured face, with
large dark eyes—eyes almost too large for the face—a slender throat,
thin sloping shoulders—eyes that looked out of the picture with a
strange intensity—a curious alertness in the countenance, as of a woman
made up of nerves and emotions, a nature wanting the element of repose.

Mildred stared at the picture three or four seconds, and then with a
choking sound like a strangled sob fell unconscious at her husband’s
feet.


END OF VOL. I.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 8 Changed: absurb lambs, and more absurd foliage
            to: absurd lambs, and more absurd foliage

  pg 9 Changed: amidst the icy formalties
            to: amidst the icy formalities





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