The Project Gutenberg eBook of The fatal three, vol. III
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The fatal three, vol. III
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release date: February 19, 2025 [eBook #75412]
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. III ***
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. III.
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
CONTENTS OF VOL. III.
Book the Third.
ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.
CHAP. PAGE
I. A WRECKED LIFE 3
II. IN THE MORNING OF LIFE 20
III. THE RIFT IN THE LUTE 44
IV. DARKNESS 62
V. THE GRAVE ON THE HILL 82
VI. PAMELA CHANGES HER MIND 95
VII. AS THE SANDS RUN DOWN 117
VIII. “HOW SHOULD I GREET THEE?” 152
IX. LITERA SCRIPTA MANET 188
X. MARKED BY FATE 217
XI. LIKE A TALE THAT IS TOLD 232
BOOK THE THIRD.
ATROPOS; OR THAT WHICH MUST BE.
CHAPTER I.
A WRECKED LIFE.
Monsieur Leroy was interested in his visitor, and in nowise hastened
her departure. He led her through the garden of the asylum, anxious
that she should see that sad life of the shattered mind in its milder
aspect. The quieter patients were allowed to amuse themselves at
liberty in the garden, and here Mildred saw the woman who fancied
herself the Blessed Virgin, and who sat apart from the rest, with a
crown of withered anemones upon her iron-gray locks.
The doctor stopped to talk to her in the Niçois language, describing
her hallucination to Mildred in his broken English between whiles.
“She is one of my oldest cases, and mild as a lamb,” he said. “She is
what superstition had made her. She might have been a happy wife as a
mother but for that fatal influence. Ah, here comes a lady of a very
different temper, and not half so easy a subject!”
A woman of about sixty advanced towards them along the dusty gravel
path between the trampled grass and the dust-whitened orange-trees, a
woman who carried her head and shoulders with the pride of an empress,
and who looked about her with defiant eyes, fanning herself with a
large Japanese paper fan as she came along, a fan of vivid scarlet and
cheap gilt paper, which seemed to intensify the brightness of her great
black eyes, as she waved it to and fro before her haggard face: a woman
who must once have been beautiful.
“Would you believe that lady was prima donna at La Scala nearly forty
years ago?” asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood beside the path,
watching that strange figure, with its theatrical dignity.
The massive plaits of grizzled black hair were wound, coronet-wise,
about the woman’s head. Her rusty black velvet gown trailed in the
dust, threadbare long ago, almost in tatters to-day: a gown of a
strange fashion, which had been worn upon the stage—Leonora’s or
Lucrezia’s gown, perhaps, once upon a time.
At sight of the physician she stopped suddenly, and made him a sweeping
curtsy, with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre.
“Do you know if they open this month at the Scala?” she asked, in
Italian.
“Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing of their doings.”
“They might have begun their season with the new year,” she said, with
a dictatorial air. “They always did in my time. Of course you know that
they have tried to engage me again. They wanted me for Amina, but I had
to remind them that I am not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall
be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my own ground. No one can touch
me there.”
She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s first scena. The once glorious
voice was rough and discordant, but there was power in the tones even
yet, and real dramatic fire in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly
while she was singing she caught the expression of Mildred’s face
watching her, and she stopped at a breath, and grasped the stranger by
both hands with an excited air.
“That moves you, does it not?” she exclaimed. “You have a soul for
music. I can see that in your face. I should like to know more of you.
Come and see me whenever you like, and I will sing to you. The doctor
lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is in a good humour.”
“Say rather when you are reasonable, my good Maria,” said Monsieur
Leroy, laying a fatherly hand upon her shoulder; “there are days when
you are not to be trusted.”
“I am to be trusted to-day. Let me come to your room and sing to her,”
pointing to Mildred with her fan. “I like her face. She has the eyes
and lips that console. Her husband is lucky to have such a wife. Let me
sing to her. I want her to understand what kind of woman I am.”
“Would it bore you too much to indulge her, madame?” asked the doctor
in an undertone. “She is a strange creature, and it will wound her
if you refuse. She does not often take a fancy to any one; but she
frequently takes dislikes, and those are violent.”
“I shall be very happy to hear her,” answered Mildred. “I am in no
hurry to return to Nice.”
The doctor led the way back to his house, the singer talking to Mildred
with an excited air as they went, talking of the day when she was first
soprano at Milan.
“Everybody envied me my success,” she said. “There were those who
said I owed everything to _him_, that he made my voice and my
style. Lies, madame, black and bitter lies. I won all the prizes
at the Conservatoire. He was one master among many. I owed him
nothing—nothing—nothing!”
She reiterated the word with acrid emphasis, and an angry furl of her
fan.
“Ah, now you are beginning the old strain!” said the doctor, with a
good-humoured shrug of his shoulders. “If this goes on there shall be
no piano for you to-day. I will have no grievances; grievances are the
bane of social intercourse. If you come to my _salon_ it must be to
sing, not to reopen old sores. We all have our wounds as well as you,
signorina, but we keep them covered up.”
“I am dumb,” said the singer meekly.
They went into the doctor’s private sitting-room. Three sides of the
room were lined with books, chiefly of a professional or scientific
character. A cottage piano stood in a recess by the fireplace. The
woman flew to the instrument with a rapturous eagerness, and began to
play. Her hands were faintly tremulous with excitement, but her touch
was that of a master as she played the symphony to the finale of “La
Cenerentola.”
“Has she no piano in her own room?” asked Mildred in a whisper.
“No, poor soul. She is one of our pauper patients. The State provides
for her, but it does not give her a private room or a piano. I let her
come here two or three times a week for an hour or so, when she is
reasonable.”
Mildred wondered if it would be possible for her, as a stranger, to
provide a room and a piano for this friendless enthusiast. She would
have been glad out of her abundance to have lightened a suffering
sister’s fate, and she determined to make the proposition to the doctor.
The singer played snatches of familiar music—Rossini, Donizetti,
Bellini—operatic airs which Mildred knew by heart. She wandered from
one scena to another, and her voice, though it had lost its sweetness
and sustaining power, was still brilliantly flexible. She sang with
a rapturous unconsciousness of her audience, Mildred and the doctor
sitting quietly at each side of the hearth, where a single pine log
smouldered on the iron dogs above a heap of white ashes.
Presently the music changed to a gayer, lighter strain, and she began
an airy cavatina, all coquetry and grace. That joyous melody was
curiously familiar to Mildred’s ear.
“Where did I hear that music?” she said aloud. “It seems as if it were
only the other day, and yet it is nearly two years since I was at the
opera.”
The singer left the cavatina unfinished, and wandered into another
melody.
“Ah, I know now!” exclaimed Mildred; “that is Paolo Castellani’s
music!”
The woman started up from the piano as if the name had wounded her.
“Paolo Castellani!” she cried. “What do you know of Paolo Castellani?”
Dr. Leroy went over to her, and laid his hand upon her shoulder heavily.
“Now we are in for a scene,” he muttered to Mildred. “You have
mentioned a most unlucky name.”
“What has she to do with Signor Castellani?”
“He was her cousin. He trained her for the stage, and she was the
original in several of his operas. She was his slave, his creature, and
lived only to please him. I suppose she expected him to marry her, poor
soul; but he knew better than that. He contrived to fascinate a French
girl, a consumptive, who was travelling in Italy for her health, with a
wealthy father. He married the Frenchwoman; and I believe that marriage
broke Maria’s heart.”
The singer had seated herself at the piano again, and was playing
with rapid and brilliant finger, running up and down the keys in wild
excitement. Mildred and the physician were standing by the window,
talking in lowered voices, unheeded by Maria Castellani.
“Was it that event which wrecked her mind?” asked Mildred, deeply
interested.
“No, it was some years afterwards that her brain gave way. She had a
brilliant career before her at the time of Castellani’s desertion;
and she bore the blow with the courage of a Roman. So long as her
voice lasted, and the public were constant to her, she contrived
to bear up against that burning sense of wrong which has been the
distinguishing note of her mind ever since she came here. But the
first breath of failure froze her. She felt her voice decaying while
she was comparatively a young woman. Her glass told her that she was
losing her beauty, that she was beginning to look old and haggard.
Her managers told her more. They gave her the cold shoulder, and put
newer singers above her head. Then despair took hold of her; she became
gloomy and irritable, difficult and capricious in her dealings with her
fellow-artists; and then came the end, and she was brought here. She
had saved no money. She had been reckless even beyond the habits of
her profession. She was friendless. There was nobody interested in her
fate—”
“Not even Signor Castellani?”
“Castellani—Paolo Castellani? _Pas si bête._ The man was a compound of
selfishness and treachery. She was not likely to get pity from him. The
very fact that he had used her badly made her loathsome to him. I doubt
if he ever inquired what became of her. If any one had asked him about
her, he would have said that she had dropped through—a worn-out voice,
a faded beauty—_que voulez-vous_?”
“She had no other friends—no ties?”
“None. She was an orphan at twelve years old, without a son. Castellani
paid for her education, and traded upon her talent. He trained her to
sing in his own operas, and in that light, fanciful music she was at
her best; though it is her delusion now that she excelled in the grand
style. I believe he absorbed the greater part of her earnings, until
they quarrelled. Some time after his marriage there was a kind of
reconciliation between them. She appeared in a new opera—his last and
worst. Her voice was going, his talent had began to fail. It was the
beginning of the end.”
“Has Signor Castellani’s son shown no interest in this poor creature’s
fate?”
“No; the son lives in England, I believe, for the most part. I doubt if
he knows anything about Maria.”
The singer had reverted to that familiar music. She sang the first
part of an aria, a melody disguised with over-much fioritura, light,
graceful, unmeaning.
“That is in his last opera,” she said, rising from the piano, with a
more rational air. “The opera was almost a failure; but I was applauded
to the echo. His genius had forsaken him. Follies, follies, falsehoods,
crimes. He could not be true to any one or anything. He was as false
to his wife as he had been false to me, and to his proud young English
signorina; ah, well! who can doubt that he lied to _her_?”
She fell into a meditative mood, standing by the piano, touching a note
now and then.
“Young and handsome and rich. Would she have accepted degradation with
open eyes? No, no, no. He lied to her as he had lied to me. He was made
up of lies.”
Her eyes grew troubled, and her lips worked convulsively. Again the
doctor laid his strong broad hand upon her shoulder.
“Come, Maria,” he said in Italian; “enough for to-day. Madame has been
pleased with your singing.”
“Yes, indeed, signora. You have a noble voice. I should be very glad if
I could do anything to be of use to you; if I could contribute to your
comfort in any way.”
“O, Maria is happy enough with us, I hope,” said the doctor cheerily.
“We are all fond of her when she is reasonable. But it is time she went
to her dinner. _A rivederci, signora._”
Maria accepted her dismissal with a good grace, saluted Mildred and
the doctor with her stage curtsy, and withdrew. One side of Monsieur
Leroy’s house opened into the garden, the other into a courtyard
adjoining the high-road.
“Poor soul! I should be so glad to pay for a piano and a private
sitting-room for her, if I might be allowed to do so,” said Mildred,
when the singer was gone.
“You are too generous, madame; but I doubt if it would be good for
her to accept your bounty. She enjoys the occasional use of my piano
intensely. If she had one always at her command, she would give up
her life to music, which exercises too strong an influence upon her
disordered brain to be indulged in _ad libitum_. Nor would a private
apartment be an advantage in her case. She is too much given to
brooding over past griefs; and the society of her fellow-sufferers, the
friction and movement of the public life, are good for her.”
“What did she mean by her talk of an English girl—some story of
wrong-doing? Was it all imaginary?”
“I believe there was some scandal at Milan; some flirtation, or
possibly an intrigue, between Castellani and one of his English pupils;
but I never heard the details. Maria’s jealousy would be likely to
exaggerate the circumstances; for I believe she adored her cousin to
the last, long after she knew that he had never cared for her, except
as an element in his success.”
Mildred took leave of the doctor, after thanking him for his
politeness. She left a handful of gold for the benefit of the poor
patients, and left Dr. Leroy under the impression that she was one of
the sweetest women he had ever met. Her pensive beauty, her low and
musical voice, the clear and resolute purpose of every word and look,
were in his mind indications of the perfection of womanhood.
“It is not often that Nature achieves such excellence,” mused the
doctor. “It is a pity that perfection should be short-lived; yet I
cannot prognosticate length of years for this lady.”
* * * * *
Pamela’s spirits were decidedly improving. She talked all dinner-time,
and gave a graphic description of her afternoon in the tennis-court
behind the Cercle de la Méditerranée.
“I am to see the club-house some morning before the members begin
to arrive,” she said. “It is a perfectly charming club. There is a
theatre, which serves as a ballroom on grand occasions. There is to be
a dance next week; and Lady Lochinvar will chaperon me, if you don’t
mind.”
“I shall be most grateful to Lady Lochinvar, dear. Believe me, if I am
a hermit, I don’t want to keep you in melancholy seclusion. I am very
glad for you to have pleasant friends.”
“Mrs. Murray is delightful. She begged me to call her Jessie. She is
going to take me for a drive before lunch to-morrow, and we are to do
some shopping in the afternoon. The shops here are simply lovely.”
“Almost as nice as Brighton?”
“Better. They have more _chic_; and I am told they are twice as dear.”
“Was Mr. Stuart at the tennis-court?”
“Yes, he plays there every afternoon when he is not at Monte Carlo.”
“That does not sound like a very useful existence.”
“Perhaps you will say _he_ is an adventurer,” exclaimed Pamela, with
a flash of temper; and then repenting in a moment, she added: “I beg
your pardon, aunt; but you are really wrong about Mr. Stuart. He looks
after Lady Lochinvar’s estate. He is invaluable to her.”
“But he cannot do much for the estate when he is playing tennis here or
gambling at Monte Carlo.”
“O, but he does. He answers no end of letters every morning. Lady
Lochinvar says he is a most wonderful young man. He attends to her
house accounts here. I am afraid she would be very extravagant if she
were not well looked after. She has no idea of business. Mr. Stuart has
even to manage her dressmakers.”
“Then one may suppose he is really useful—even at Nice. Has he any
means of his own, or is he entirely dependent on his aunt?”
“O, he has an income of his own—a modest income, Mrs. Murray says,
hardly enough for him to get along easily in a cavalry regiment,
but quite enough for him as a civilian; and his aunt will leave him
everything. His expectations are splendid.”
“Well, Pamela, I will not call _him_ an adventurer, and I shall be
pleased to make his acquaintance, if he will call upon me.”
“He is dying to know you. May Mrs. Murray bring him to tea to-morrow
afternoon?”
“With pleasure.”
CHAPTER II
IN THE MORNING OF LIFE.
George Greswold succumbed to Fate. He had done all he could do in the
way of resistance. He had appealed against his wife’s decision; he had
set love against principle or prejudice, and principle, as Mildred
understood it, had been too strong for love; so there was nothing left
for the forsaken husband but submission. He went back to the home in
which he had once been happy, and he sat down amidst the ruins of his
domestic life; he sat by his desolate hearth through the long dull
wintry months, and he made no effort to bring brightness or variety
into his existence. He made no stand against unmerited misfortune.
“I am too old to forget,” he told himself; “that lesson can only be
learnt in youth.”
A young man might have gone out as a wanderer—might have sought
excitement and distraction amidst strange cities and strange races
of men; might have found forgetfulness in danger and hardship, the
perils of unexplored deserts, the hazards of untrodden mountains, the
hairbreadth escapes of savage life, pestilence, famine, warfare. George
Greswold felt no inclination for any such adventure. The mainspring of
life had snapped, and he admitted to himself that he was a broken man.
He sat by the hearth in his gloomy library day after day, and night
after night, until the small hours. Sometimes he took his gun in the
early morning, and went out with a leash of dogs for an hour or two of
solitary shooting among his own covers. He tramped his copses in all
weathers and at all hours, but he rarely went outside his own domain;
nor did he ever visit his cottagers or small tenantry, with whom he had
been once so familiar a friend. All interest in his estate had gone
from him after his daughter’s death. He left everything to the new
steward, who was happily both competent and honest.
His books were his only friends. Those studious habits acquired years
before, when he was comparatively a poor man, stood by him now. His
one distraction, his only solace, was found in the contents of those
capacious bookshelves, three-fourths of which were filled with volumes
of his own selection, the gradual accumulation of his sixteen years of
ownership. His grandfather’s library, which constituted the remaining
fourth, consisted of those admirable standard works, in the largest
possible number of volumes, which formed an item in the furniture
of a respectable house during the last century, and which, from the
stiffness of their bindings and the unblemished appearance of their
paper and print, would seem to have enjoyed an existence of dignified
retirement from the day they left the bookseller’s shop.
But for those long tramps in the wintry copses, where holly and ivy
showed brightly green amidst leafless chestnuts and hazels—but for
those communings with the intellect of past and present in the long
still winter evenings, George Greswold’s brain must have given way
under the burden of an undeserved sorrow. As it was, he contrived to
live on, peacefully, and even with an air of contentment. His servants
surprised him in no paroxysm of grief. He startled them with no strange
exclamations. His manner gave no cause for alarm. He accepted his
lot in silence and submission. His days were ordered with a simple
regularity, so far as the service of the house went. His valet and
butler agreed that he was in all things an admirable master.
The idea in the household was that Mrs. Greswold had “taken to
religion.” That seemed the only possible explanation for a parting
which had been preceded by no domestic storms, for which there was
no apparent cause in the conduct of the husband. That idea of the
wife having discovered an intrigue of her husband’s, which Louisa
had discussed in the housekeeper’s room at Brighton, was no longer
entertained in the servants’-hall at Enderby.
“If there had been anything of that kind, something would have come
out by this time,” said the butler, who had a profound belief in the
ultimate “coming out” of all social mysteries.
George Greswold was not kept in ignorance of his wife’s movements.
Pamela had been shrewd enough to divine that her uncle would be glad
to hear from her in order to hear of Mildred, and she had written to
him from time to time, giving him a graphic account of her own and her
aunt’s existence.
There had been only one suppression. The young lady had not once
alluded to Castellani’s share in their winter life at Pallanza. She
had a horror of arousing that dragon of suspicion which she knew to
lurk in the minds of all uncles with reference to all agreeable young
men. George Greswold had not heard from his niece for more than a
fortnight, when there came a letter, written the day after Mildred’s
visit to the madhouse, and full of praises of Lady Lochinvar and the
climate of Nice. That letter was the greatest shock that Greswold had
received since his wife had left him, for it told him that she was in
a place where she could scarcely fail to discover all the details of
his wretched story. He had kept it locked from her, he had shut himself
behind a wall of iron, he had kept a silence as of the grave; and now
she from whom he had prayed that his fatal story might be for ever
hidden was certain to learn the worst.
“Aunt went to lunch with Lady Lochinvar the day after our arrival,”
wrote Pamela. “She spent a long morning with her, and then went for a
drive somewhere in the environs, and was out till nearly dinner-time.
She looked so white and fagged when she came back, poor dear, and I
am sure she had done too much for one day. Lady Lochinvar asked me to
dinner, and took me to the new Opera-house, which is lovely. Her nephew
was with us—rather plain, and with no taste for music (he said he
preferred _Madame Angot_ to _Lohengrin_), but enormously clever, I am
told, in a solid, practical kind of way.”
_Und so weiter_, for three more pages.
Mildred had been with Lady Lochinvar—with Lady Lochinvar, who knew all;
who had seen him and his wife together; had received them both as her
friends; had been confided in, he knew, by that fond, jealous wife;
made the recipient of tearful doubts and hysterical accusations. Vivien
had owned as much to him.
She had been with Lady Lochinvar, who must know the history of his
wife’s death and the dreadful charge brought against him; who must know
that he had been an inmate of the great white barrack on the road to
St. André; who in all probability thought him guilty of murder. All the
barriers had fallen now; all the floodgates had opened. He saw himself
hateful, monstrous, inhuman, in the eyes of the woman he adored.
“She loved her sister with an inextinguishable love,” he thought,
“and she sees me now as her sister’s murderer—the cold-blooded, cruel
husband, who made his wife’s existence miserable, and ended by killing
her in a paroxysm of brutal rage: that is the kind of monster I must
seem in my Mildred’s eyes. She will look back upon my stubborn silence,
my gloomy reserve, and she will see all the indications of guilt. My
own conduct will condemn me.”
As he sat by his solitary hearth in the cold March evening, the
large reading-lamp making a circle of light amidst the gloom, George
Greswold’s mind travelled over the days of his youth, and the period of
that fatal marriage which had blighted him in the morning of his life,
which blighted him now in life’s meridian, when, but for this dark
influence, all the elements of happiness were in his hand.
He looked back to the morning of life, and saw himself full of
ambitions plans and aspiring dreams, well content to be the younger
son, to whom it was given to make his own position in the world,
scorning the idle days of a fox-hunting squire, resolute to become
an influence for good among his fellow-men. He had never envied his
brother the inheritance of the soil; he had thought but little of his
own promised inheritance of Enderby.
Unhappily that question of the succession to the Enderby estate had
been a sore point with Squire Ransome. He adored his elder son, who
was like him in character and person, and he cared very little for
George, whom he considered a bookish and unsympathetic individual; a
young man who hardly cared whether there were few or many foxes in the
district, whether the young partridges throve, or perished by foul
weather or epidemic disease—a young man who took no interest in the
things that filled the lives of other people. In a word, George was not
a sportsman; and that deficiency made him an alien to his father’s
race. There had never been a Ransome who was not “sporting” to the core
of his heart until the appearance of this pragmatical Oxonian.
Without being in any manner scientific or a student of evolution,
Mr. Ransome had a fixed belief in heredity. It was the duty of the
son to resemble the father; and a son who was in all his tastes and
inclinations a distinct variety stamped himself as undutiful.
“I don’t suppose the fellow can help it,” said Mr. Ransome testily;
“but there’s hardly a remark he makes which doesn’t act upon my nerves
like a nutmeg-grater.”
Nobody would have given the Squire credit for possessing very sensitive
nerves, but everybody knew he had a temper, and a temper which
occasionally showed itself in violent outbreaks—the kind of temper
which will dismiss a household at one fell swoop, send a stud of horses
to Tattersall’s on the spur of the moment, tear up a lease on the point
of signature, or turn a son out of doors.
The knowledge that this unsportsmanlike son of his would inherit the
fine estate of Enderby was a constant source of vexation to Squire
Ransome of Mapledown. The dream of his life was that Mapledown and
Enderby should be united in the possession of his son Randolph. The two
properties would have made Randolph rich enough to hope for a peerage,
and that idea of a possible peerage dazzled the Tory squire. His family
had done the State some service; had sat for important boroughs; had
squandered much money upon contested elections; had been staunch in
times of change and difficulty. There was no reason why a Ransome
should not ascend to the Upper House, in these days when peerages are
bestowed so much more freely than in the time of Pitt and Fox. The two
estates would have made an important property under one ownership;
divided, they were only respectable. And what the Squire most keenly
felt was the fact that Enderby was by far the finer property, and that
his younger son must ultimately be a much richer man than his brother.
The Sussex estate had dwindled considerably in those glorious days
of contested elections and party feeling; the Hampshire estate was
intact. Mr. Ransome could not forgive his wife for her determination
that the younger son should be her heir. He always shuffled uneasily
upon his seat in the old family pew when the 27th chapter of Genesis
was read in the Sunday morning service. He compared his wife to
Rebecca. He asked the Vicar at luncheon on one of those Sundays what
he thought of the conduct of Rebecca and Jacob in that very shady
transaction, and the Vicar replied in the orthodox fashion, favouring
Jacob just as Rebecca had favoured him.
“I can’t understand it,” exclaimed the Squire testily; “the whole
business is against my idea of honour and honesty. I wouldn’t have
such a fellow as Jacob for my steward if he were the cleverest man
in Sussex. And look you here, Vicar. If Jacob was right, and knew he
was right, why the deuce was he so frightened the first time he met
Esau after that ugly business? Take my word for it, Jacob was a sneak,
and Providence punished him rightly with a desolate old age and a
quarrelsome family.”
The Vicar looked down at his plate, sighed gently, and held his peace.
The time came when the growing feeling of aversion on the father’s part
showed itself in outrage and insult which the son could not endure.
George remonstrated against certain acts of injustice in the management
of the estate. He pleaded the cause of tenant against landlord—a dire
offence in the eyes of the Tory Squire. There came an open rupture; and
it was impossible for the younger son to remain any longer under the
father’s roof. His mother loved him devotedly, but she felt that it was
better for him to go; and so it was settled, in loving consultation
between mother and son, that he should carry out a long-cherished wish
of his Oxford days, and explore all that was historical and interesting
in Southern Europe, seeing men and cities in a leisurely way, and
devoting himself to literature in the meantime. He had already written
for some of the high-class magazines; and he felt that it was in him to
do well as a writer of the serious order—critic, essayist, and thinker.
His mother gave him three hundred a year, which, for a young man of
his simple habits, was ample. He told himself that he should be able
to earn as much again by his pen; and so, after a farewell of decent
friendliness to his father and his brother Randolph, and tenderest
parting with his mother, he set out upon his pilgrimage, a free agent,
with the world all before him. He explored Greece—dwelling fondly upon
all the old traditions, the old histories. He made the acquaintance
of Dr. Schliemann, and entered heart and soul into that gentleman’s
views. This occupied him more than a year, for those scenes exercised
a potent fascination upon a mind to which Greek literature was the
supreme delight. He spent a month at Constantinople, and a winter in
Corfu and Cyprus; he devoted a summer to Switzerland, and did a little
mountaineering; and during all his wanderings he contrived to give a
considerable portion of his time to literature.
It was after his Swiss travels that he went to Italy, and established
himself in Florence for a quiet winter. He hired an apartment on a
fourth floor of a palace overlooking the Arno, and here, for the first
time since he had left England, he went a little into general society.
His mother had sent him letters of introduction to old friends of her
own, English and Florentine; he was young, handsome, and a gentleman,
and he was received with enthusiasm. Had he been fond of society he
might have been at parties every night; but he was fonder of books and
of solitude, and he took very little advantage of people’s friendliness.
The few houses to which he went were houses famous for good music, and
it was in one of these houses that he met Vivien Faux.
It was in the midst of a symphony by Beethoven, while he was standing
on the edge of the crowd which surrounded the open space given to the
instrumentalists, that he first saw the woman who was to be his wife.
She was sitting in the recess of a lofty window, quite apart from the
throng—a pale, dark-eyed girl, with roughened hair carelessly heaped
above her low, broad forehead. Her slender figure and sloping shoulders
showed to advantage in a low-necked black gown, without a vestige of
ornament. She wore neither jewels nor flowers, at an assembly where
gems were sparkling and flowers breathing sweetness upon every feminine
bosom. Her thin, white arms hung loosely in her lap; her back was
turned to the performers, and her eyes were averted from the crowd. She
looked the image of _ennui_ and indifference.
He found his hostess directly the symphony was over, and asked her to
introduce him to the young lady in black velvet yonder, sitting alone
in the window.
“Have you been struck by Miss Faux’s rather singular appearance?” asked
Signora Vicenti. “She is not so handsome as many young ladies who are
here to-night.”
“No, she is not handsome, but her face interests me. She looks as if
she had suffered some great disappointment.”
“I believe her whole life has been a disappointment. She is an orphan,
and, as far as I can ascertain, a friendless orphan. She has good
means, but there is a mystery about her position which places her in
a manner apart from other girls of her age. She has no relations to
whom to refer, no family home to which to return. She is here with some
rather foolish people—an English artist and his wife, who cannot do
very much for her, and I believe she keenly feels her isolation. It
makes her bitter against other girls, and she loses friends as fast as
she makes them. People won’t put up with her tongue. Well, Mr. Ransome,
do you change your mind after that?”
“On the contrary, I feel so much the more interested in the young lady.”
“Ah, your interest will not last. However, I shall be charmed to
introduce you.”
They went across the room to that distant recess where Miss Faux was
still seated, her hair and attitude unchanged since George Ransome
first observed her. She started with a little look of surprise when
Signora Vicenti and her companion approached; but she accepted the
introduction with a nonchalant air, and she replied to Ransome’s
opening remarks with manifest indifference. Then by degrees she grew
more animated, and talked about the people in the room, ridiculing
their pretensions, their eccentricities, their costume.
“You are not an _habitué_ here?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing
you before to-night.”
“No; it is the first of Signora Vicenti’s parties that I have seen.”
“Then I conclude it will be the last.”
“Why?”
“O, no sensible person would come a second time. The music is tolerable
if one could hear it anywhere else, but the people are odious.”
“Yet I conclude this is not your first evening here?”
“No; I come every week. I have nothing else to do with myself but to go
about to houses I hate, and mix with people who hate me.”
“Why should they hate you?”
“O, we all hate each other, and want to overreach one another. Envy and
malice are in the air. Picture to yourself fifty manœuvring mothers
with a hundred marriageable daughters, most of them portionless, and
about twenty eligible men. Think how ferocious the competition must be!”
“But you are independent of all that; you are outside the arena.”
“Yes; I have nothing to do with their slavemarket, but they hate me
all the same; perhaps because I have a little more money than most
of them; perhaps because I am nobody—a waif and stray—able to give no
account of my existence.”
She spoke of her position with a reckless candour that shocked him.
“There is something to bear in every lot,” he said, trying to be
philosophical.
“I suppose so, but I only care about my own burden. Please, don’t
pretend that you do either. I should despise a man who pretended not to
be selfish.”
“Do you think that all men are selfish?”
“I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. The man I thought the
noblest and the best did me the greatest wrong it was possible to do
me, in order to spare himself trouble.”
Ransome was silent. He would not enter into the discussion of a past
history of which he was ignorant, and which was doubtless full of pain.
After this he met her very often, and while other young men avoided
her on account of her bitter tongue, he showed a preference for her
society, and encouraged her to confide in him. She went everywhere,
chaperoned by Mr. Mortimer, a dreary twaddler, who was for ever
expounding theories of art which he had picked up, parrot-wise, in a
London art-school thirty years before. His latest ideas were coeval
with Maclise and Mulready. Mrs. Mortimer was by way of being an
invalid, and sat and nursed her neuralgia at home, while her husband
and Miss Faux went into society.
It was at the beginning of spring that an American lady of wealth and
standing invited the Mortimers and their _protégée_ to a picnic, to
which Mr. Ransome was also bidden; and it was this picnic which sealed
George Ransome’s fate. Pity for Vivien’s lonely position had grown into
a sincere regard. He had discovered warm feelings under that cynical
manner, a heart capable of a profound affection. She had talked to him
of a child, a kind of adopted sister, whom she had passionately loved,
and from whom she had been parted by the selfish cruelty of the little
girl’s parents.
“My school-life in England had soured me before then,” she said, “and
I was not a very amiable person even at fifteen years old; but _that_
cruelty finished me. I have hated my fellow-creatures ever since.”
He pleaded against this wholesale condemnation.
“You were unlucky,” he said, “in encountering unworthy people.”
“Ah, but one of those people, the child’s father, had seemed to me the
best of men. I had believed in him as second only to God in benevolence
and generosity. When _he_ failed I renounced my belief in human
goodness.”
Unawares, George Ransome had fallen into the position of her confidant
and friend. From friendship to love was an easy transition; and a few
words, spoken at random during a ramble on an olive-clad hill, bound
him to her for ever. Those unpremeditated words loosed the fountain of
tears, and he saw the most scornful of women, the woman who affected an
absolute aversion for his sex, and a contempt for those weaker sisters
who waste their love upon such vile clay—he saw her abandon herself to
a passion of tears at the first word of affection which he had ever
addressed to her. He had spoken as a friend rather than as a lover; but
those tears bound him to her for life. He put his arm round her, and
pillowed the small pale face upon his breast, the dark impassioned eyes
looking up at him drowned in tears.
“You should not have said those words,” she sobbed. “You cannot
understand what it is to have lived as I have lived—a creature
apart—unloved—unvalued. O, is it true?—do you really care for me?”
“With all my heart,” he answered, and in good faith.
His profound compassion took the place of love; and in that moment
he believed that he loved her as a man should love the woman whom he
chooses for his wife.
They were married within a month from that March afternoon; and for
some time their married life was happy. He wished to take her to
England, but she implored him to abandon that idea.
“In England everybody would want to know who I am,” she said. “I should
be tortured by questions about ‘my people.’ Abroad, society is less
exacting.”
He deferred to her in this, as he would have done in any other matter
which involved her happiness. They spent the first half-year of their
married life in desultory wanderings in the Oberland and the Engadine,
and then settled at Nice for the winter.
Here Mrs. Ransome met Lady Lochinvar, whom she had known at Florence,
and was at once invited to the Palais Montano; and here for the first
time appeared those clouds which were too soon to darken George
Ransome’s domestic horizon.
There were many beautiful women at Nice that winter: handsome Irish
girls, vivacious Americans, Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen; and among
so many who were charming there were some whom George Ransome did not
scruple to admire, with as much frankness as he would have admired
a face by Guido or Raffaelle. He was slow to perceive his wife’s
distrust, could hardly bring himself to believe that she could be
jealous of him; but he was not suffered to remain long in this happy
ignorance. A hysterical outburst one night after their return from a
ball at the Club-house opened the husband’s eyes. The demon of jealousy
stood revealed; and from that hour the angel of domestic peace was
banished from George Ransome’s hearth.
He struggled against that evil influence. He exercised patience,
common sense, forbearance; but in vain. There were lulls in the
storm sometimes, delusive calms; and he hoped the demon was
exorcised. And then came a worse outbreak; more hysterics; despairing
self-abandonment; threats of suicide. He bore it as long as he could,
and ultimately, his wife’s health offering an excuse for such a step,
he proposed that they should leave Nice, and take a villa in the
environs, in some quiet spot where they might live apart from all
society.
Vivien accepted the proposition with rapture; she flung herself at her
husband’s feet, and covered his hands with tearful kisses.
“O, if I could but believe that you still love me, that you are not
weary of me,” she exclaimed, “I should be the happiest woman in the
universe.”
They spent a week of halcyon peace, driving about in quest of their
new home. They explored the villages within ten miles of Nice, they
breakfasted at village restaurants, in the sunny March noontide, and
finally they settled upon a villa at St. Jean, within an hour’s drive
of the great white city, and to this new home they went at the end of
the month, after bidding adieu to their friends in Nice.
CHAPTER III.
THE RIFT IN THE LUTE.
The villa was built on a ledge of ground between the road and the
sea. There was a stone terrace in front of the windows of _salon_ and
dining-room, below which the ground shelved steeply down to the rocks
and the blue water. The low irregular-shaped house was screened from
the road by a grove of orange and lemon trees, with a peach or a cherry
here and there to give variety of colour. In one corner there was a
whole cluster of peach-trees, which made a mass of purplish-pinky
bloom. The ridges of garden sloping down from the stone terrace were
full of white stocks and scarlet anemones. Clusters of red ranunculus
made spots of flame in the sun, and the young leaves in the long hedge
of Dijon roses wove an interlacing screen of crimson, through which the
sun shone as through old ruby glass in a cathedral window. Everywhere
there was a feast of perfume and colour and beauty. The little bay,
the curving pier, the white-sailed boats, which, seen from the height
above, looked no bigger than the gulls skimming across the blue; the
quaint old houses of Villefranche on a level with the water, and rising
tier above tier to the crest of the hill—pink and blue houses, white
and cream-coloured houses, with pea-green shutters and red roofs. Far
away to the left, the jutting promontory and the tall white lighthouse;
and away southward, the sapphire sea, touched with every changing light
and shadow. And this lovely little world at George Ransome’s feet, this
paradise in miniature, was all the lovelier because of the great rugged
mountain-wall behind it, the bare red and yellow hills baked in the
sunlight of ages, the strange old-world villages yonder high up on the
stony flanks of the hills, the far-away church towers, from which faint
sound of bells came now and again as if from fairyland.
It was a delicious spot this little village of St. Jean, to which
the Niçois came on Sundays and holidays, to eat bouillabaisse at the
rustic tavern or to picnic in the shade of century-old olives and old
carouba-trees, which made dark masses of foliage between the road and
the sea. George Ransome loved the place, and could have been happy
there if his wife would only have allowed him; but those halcyon days
which marked the beginning of their retirement were too soon ended; and
clouds lowered again over the horizon—clouds of doubt and discontent.
There are women to whom domestic peace, a calm and rational happiness,
is an impossibility, and Vivien was one of these women.
From the beginning her suspicious nature had been on the watch for some
hidden evil. She had a fixed idea that the Fates had marked her for
misery, and she would not open her heart to the sunlight of happiness.
Was her husband unkind to her? No, he was all kindness; but to her
his kindness seemed only a gentleman-like form of toleration. He had
married her out of pity; and it was pity that made him kind. Other
women were worshipped. It was her fate to be tolerated by a man she
adored.
She could never forget her own passionate folly, her own unwomanly
forwardness. She had thrown herself into his arms—she who should
have waited to be wooed, and should have made herself precious by the
difficulty with which she was won.
“How can he help holding me cheap?” she asked herself—“I who cost him
nothing, not even an hour of doubt? From the hour we first met he must
have known that I adored him.”
Once when he was rowing her about the bay in the westering sunlight,
while the fishermen were laying down their lines, or taking up their
baskets here and there by the rocks, she asked him suddenly,
“What did you think of me, George, the first time you saw me—that night
at Signora Vicenti’s party? Come, be candid. You can afford to tell
me the truth now. Your fate is sealed; you have nothing to lose or to
gain.”
“Do you think I would tell you less or more than the truth under any
circumstances, Viva?” he asked gravely.
“O, you are horribly exact, I know!” she answered, with an impatient
movement of her slender sloping shoulders, not looking at him, but
with her dark dreamy eyes gazing far off across the bay towards the
distant point where the twin towers of Monaco Cathedral showed faint
in the distance, “but perhaps if the truth sounded very rude you might
suppress it—out of pity.”
“I don’t think the truth need sound rude.”
“Well,” still more impatiently, “what impression did I make upon you?”
“You must consider that there were at least fifty young ladies in
Signora Vicenti’s _salons_ that evening.”
“And about thirty old women; and I was lost in the crowd.”
“Not quite lost. I remember being attracted by a young lady who sat in
a window niche apart—”
“Like ‘Brunswick’s fated chieftain.’ Pray go on.”
“And who seemed a little out of harmony with the rest of the company.
Her manner struck me as unpleasantly ironical, but her small pale face
interested me, and I even liked the mass of towzled hair brushed up
from her low square forehead. I liked her black velvet gown, without
any colour or ornament. It set off the thin white shoulders and long
slender throat.”
“Did you think I was rich or poor, somebody or nobody?”
“I thought you were a clever girl, soured by some kind of
disappointment.”
“And you felt sorry for me. Say you felt sorry for me!” she cried, her
eyes coming back from the distant promontory, and fixing him suddenly,
bright, keen, imperious in their eager questioning.
“Yes, I confess to feeling very sorry for you.”
“Did I not know as much? From the very first you pitied me. Pity, pity!
What an intolerable burden it is! I have bent under it all my life.”
“My dear Viva, what nonsense you talk! Because I had mistaken ideas
about you that first night, when we were strangers—”
“You were not mistaken. I was soured. I had been disappointed. My
thoughts were bitter as gall. I had no patience with other girls who
had so many blessings that I had never known. I saw them making light
of their advantages, peevish, ill-tempered, self-indulgent; and I
scorned them. Contempt for others was the only comfort of my barren
life. And so my vinegar tongue disgusted you, did it not?”
“I was not disgusted—concerned and interested, rather. Your
conversation was original. I wanted to know more of you.”
“Did you think me pretty?”
“I was more impressed by your mental gifts than your physical—”
“That is only a polite way of saying you thought me plain.”
“Viva, you know better than that. If I thought of your appearance
at all during that first meeting, be assured I thought you
interesting—yes, and pretty. Only prettiness is a poor word to express
a face that is full of intellect and originality.”
“You thought me pale, faded, haggard, old for my age,” she said
decisively. “Don’t deny it. You must have seen what my glass had been
telling me for the last year.”
“I thought your face showed traces of suffering.”
This was one of many such conversations, full of keen questioning on
her part, with an assumed lightness of manner which thinly veiled the
irritability of her mind. She had changed for the worse since they left
Nice; she had grown more sensitive, more suspicious, more irritable.
She was in a condition of health in which many women are despondent or
irritable—in which with some women life seems one long disgust, and all
things are irksome, even the things that have been pleasantest and most
valued before—even the aspect of a lovely landscape, the phrases of a
familiar melody, the perfume of a once favourite flower. He tried to
cheer her by talking of their future, the time to come when there would
be a new bond between them, a new interest in their lives; but she saw
all things in a gloomy atmosphere.
“Who knows?” she said. “I may die, perhaps; or you may love your child
better than you have ever loved me, and then I should hate it.”
“Viva, you cannot doubt that my love for our child will strengthen my
love for you.”
“Will it?” she asked incredulously. “God knows it needs strengthening.”
This was hard upon a man whose tenderness and indulgence had been
boundless, who had done all that chivalry and a sense of duty can do to
atone for the lack of love. He had tried his uttermost to conceal the
one bitter truth that love was wanting: but those keen eyes of hers had
seen the gap between them, that sensitive ear had discovered the rift
in the lute.
One afternoon they climbed the hill to the breezy common on which the
lighthouse stands, and dawdled about in the sunshine, gathering the
pale gray rosemary bloom and the perfumed thyme which grow among those
hollows and hillocks in such wild luxuriance. They were sauntering near
the carriage-road, talking very little—she feeble and tired, although
it was her own fancy to have walked so far—when they saw a carriage
driving towards them—a large landau, with the usual bony horses and
shabby jingling harness, and the usual sunburnt good-tempered driver.
Two girls in white gowns and Leghorn hats were in the carriage, with
an elderly woman in black. Their laps were full of wild flowers, and
branches of wild cherry and pear blossom filled the leather hood
at the back of the carriage. They were talking and laughing gaily,
all animation and high spirits, as they drew near; and at sight of
George Ransome one of them waved her hand in greeting, and called to
the driver to stop. They were two handsome Irish girls who had made a
sensation at the Battle of Flowers six weeks before. They were spoken
of by some people as the belles of Nice. Mr. Ransome had pelted them
with Parma violets and yellow rosebuds on the Promenade des Anglais,
as they drove up and down in a victoria embowered in white stocks and
narcissi. He had waltzed with them at the Cercle de la Méditerranée and
the Palais Montano; had admired them frankly and openly, not afraid to
own even to a jealous wife that he thought them beautiful.
Delia Darcy, the elder and handsomer of the two, leaned over the
carriage-door to shake hands with him, while Vivien stood aloof, on a
grassy knoll above the road, looking daggers. What right had they to
stop their carriage and waylay her husband?
“Who would have thought of finding you in this out-of-the-way spot?”
exclaimed Miss Darcy; “we fancied you had left the Riviera. Are you
stopping at Monte Carlo?”
“No, I have taken a villa at St. Jean.”
“Is that near here?”
“Very near. You must have skirted the village in driving up here. And
has Nice been very gay since we left?”
“No; people have been going away, and we have missed you dreadfully at
the opera, and at dances, and at Rumpelmeyer’s. What could have induced
you to bury yourself alive in a village?” she asked vivaciously, with
that sparkling manner which gives an air of flirtation to the most
commonplace talk.
“My wife has been out of health, and it has suited us both to live
quietly.”
“Poor Mrs. Ransome—poor you!” exclaimed Miss Darcy, with a sigh. “O,
there she is! How do you do, Mrs. Ransome?” gesticulating with a pretty
little hand in a long wrinkled tan glove. “Do come and talk to us.”
Mrs. Ransome bowed stiffly, but did not move an inch. She stood
picking a branch of rosemary to shreds with nervous restless fingers,
scattering the poor pale blue-gray blossoms as if she were sprinkling
them upon a corpse. The two girls took no further notice of her, but
both bent forward, talking to Ransome, rattling on about this ball and
the other ball, and a breakfast, and sundry afternoon teas, and the
goings-on—audacious for the most part—of all the smart people at Nice.
They had worlds to tell him, having taken it into their heads that he
was a humorist, a cynic, who delighted in hearing of the follies of
his fellow-man. He stood with his hat off, waiting for the carriage
to drive on, inwardly impatient of delay, knowing with what jealous
feelings Vivien had always regarded Delia Darcy, dreading a fit of
ill-temper when the Irish girls should have vanished by and by below
the sandy edge of the common. He listened almost in silence, giving
their loquacity no more encouragement than good manners obliged.
“Why don’t you come to the next dance at the Cercle de la
Méditerranée?” said Delia coaxingly; “there are so few good dancers
left, and your step is just the one that suits me best. There are to
be amateur theatricals to begin with—scenes from _Much Ado_; and I am
to be Beatrice. Won’t that tempt you?” she asked, with the insolence
of an acknowledged beauty, spoiled by the laxer manners of a foreign
settlement, lolling back in the carriage, and smiling at him with
brilliant Irish gray eyes, under the shadow of her Leghorn hat, with a
great cluster of daffodils just above her forehead, the yellow bloom
showing vividly against her dark hair.
The other sister was only a paler reflection of this one, and echoed
her speeches, laughing when she laughed.
“Surely you will come to see Delia act Beatrice?” she said. “I can’t
tell you how well she does it. Sir Randall Spofforth is the Benedict.”
“My dears, we shall have no time to dress for dinner!” expostulated the
duenna, feeling that this kind of thing had lasted long enough. “_En
avant, cocher._”
“Won’t you come?” pleaded the pertinacious Delia; “it is on the
twenty-ninth, remember—next Thursday week.”
The carriage rolled slowly onward.
“I regret that I shall not be there,” said Ransome decisively.
Delia shook her parasol at him in pretended anger.
He rejoined his wife. She stood surrounded by the shreds of rosemary
and thyme which she had plucked and scattered while he was talking. She
was very pale; and he knew only too well that she was very angry.
“Come, Viva, it is time we turned homeward,” he said.
“Yes, the sun has gone down, has it not?” she exclaimed mockingly, as
she looked after the carriage, which sank below the ragged edge of
heather and thyme yonder, as if it had dropped over the cliff.
“Why, my love, the sun is above our heads!”
“Is it? _Your_ sun is gone down, anyhow. She is very lovely, is she
not?”
The question was asked with sudden eagerness, as if her life depended
upon the reply. She was walking quickly in her agitation, going down
the hill much faster than she had mounted it.
“Yes, they are both handsome girls, feather-headed, but remarkably
handsome,” her husband answered carelessly.
“But Delia is the lovelier. _She_ is your divinity.”
“Yes, she is the lovelier. The other seems a copy by an inferior hand.”
“And she is so fond of you. It was cruel to refuse her request, when
she pleaded so hard.”
“How can you be so foolish or so petty, Vivien? Is it impossible for
me to talk for five minutes with a handsome girl without unreasonable
anger on your part?”
“Do you expect me to be pleased or happy when I see your admiration of
another woman—admiration you do not even take the trouble to conceal?
Do you suppose I can ever forget last winter—how I have seen you
dancing with that girl night after night? Yes, I have had to sit and
watch you. I was not popular, I had few partners; and it is bad form to
dance more than once with one’s husband. I have seen her in your arms,
with her head almost lying on your shoulder, again and again, as if it
were her natural place. ‘What a handsome couple!’ I have heard people
say; ‘are they engaged?’ Do you think _that_ was pleasant for me?”
“You had but to say one word, and I would have left off dancing for
ever.”
“Another sacrifice—like your marriage.”
“Vivien, you would provoke a saint.”
“Yes, it is provoking to be chained to one woman when you are dying for
another.”
“How much oftener am I to swear to you that I don’t care a straw for
Miss Darcy?”
“Never again,” she answered. “I love you too well to wish you to swear
a lie.”
They had come down from the common by this time, and were now upon a
pathway nearer home—a narrow footpath on the edge of the cliff opposite
Beaulieu; the gently-curving bay below them, and behind and above them
orchards and gardens, hill and lighthouse. It was one of their chosen
walks. They had paced the narrow path many an afternoon when the twin
towers of Monaco showed dark in the shadow of sundown.
“Vivien, I think you are the most difficult creature to live with that
ever a man had for his wife,” said Ransome, stung to the quick by her
persistent perversity.
“I am difficult to live with, am I?” she cried. “Why don’t you go a
step further—why don’t you say at once that you wish I were dead?” she
cried, with a wild burst of passion. “Say that you wish me dead.”
“I own that when you torment me, as you are doing to-day, I have
sometimes thought of death—yours or mine—as the only escape from mutual
misery,” he answered gloomily.
He had been sauntering a few paces in front of her along the narrow
path between the olive-garden and the edge of the cliff, she following
slowly—both in a desultory way, and talking to each other without
seeing each other’s face. The cliff sank sheer below the pathway, with
only a narrow margin of rushy grass between the footpath and the brink
of the precipice. It was no stupendous depth, no giddy height from
which the eye glanced downward, sickening at the horror of the gulf.
One looked down at the jewel-bright waves and the many-hued rocks, the
fir-trees growing out of the crags, without a thought of danger; and
yet a false step upon those sunburnt rushes might mean instant death.
He came to a sudden standstill after that last speech, and stood
leaning with both hands upon his stick, angry, full of gloom, feeling
that he had said a cruel thing, yet not repenting of his cruelty. He
stood there expectant of her angry answer; but there was only silence.
Silence, and then a swift rushing sound, like the flight of a great
bird. He looked round, and saw that he was alone!
CHAPTER IV.
DARKNESS.
She had flung herself over the cliff. That rustling noise was the
sound of her gown as it brushed against the rushes and seedling firs
that clothed the precipice with verdure. He looked over the cliff, and
saw her lying among the rocks, a white motionless figure, mangled and
crushed, dumb and dead, his victim and his accuser.
His first impulse was to fling himself over the edge where she had cast
away her life a minute ago; but common sense overcame that movement of
despair. A few yards further towards the point the side of the cliff
was less precipitous. There were jutting ledges of rock and straggling
bushes by which a good climber might let himself down to the beach,
not without hazard, but with a fair chance of safety. As he scrambled
downward he saw a fisherman’s boat shooting across the bay, and he
thought that his wife’s fall had been seen from the narrow strip of
sandy shore yonder towards Beaulieu.
She was lying on her side among the low wet slabs of rock, the blue
water lapping round her. There was blood upon her face, and on one
mangled arm, from which the muslin sleeve was ripped. Her gown had
caught in the bushes, and was torn to shreds; and the water flowing so
gently in and out among her loosened hair was tinged with blood.
Her eyes were wide open, staring wildly, and they had a glassy look
already. He knew that she was dead.
“Did you see her fall?” he asked the men in the boat, as they came near.
“No,” said one. “I heard the gulls scream, and I knew there was
something. And then I looked about and saw something white lying there,
under the cliff.”
They lifted her gently into the boat, and laid her on a folded sail
at the bottom, as gently and as tenderly as if she were still capable
of feeling, as if she were not past cure. George Ransome asked no
question, invited no opinion. He sat in the stern of the boat, dumb
and quiet. The horror of this sudden doom had paralysed him. What had
he done that this thing should happen, this wild revenge of a woman’s
passionate heart which made him a murderer? What had he done? Had he
not been patient and forbearing, indulgent beyond the common indulgence
of husbands to fretful wives? Had he not blunted the edge of wrath
with soft answers? Had he not been affectionate and considerate even
when love was dead? And yet because of one hard speech, wrung from his
irritated nerves, this wild creature had slain herself.
The two fishermen looked at him curiously. He saw the dark southern
eyes watching him; saw gravity and restraint upon those fine olive
faces which had been wont to beam with friendly smiles. He knew that
they suspected evil, but he was in no mood to undeceive them. He sat in
an apathetic silence, motionless, stupefied almost, while the men rowed
slowly round the point in the golden light of sundown. He scarcely
looked at that white still figure lying at the bottom of the boat, the
face hidden under a scarlet kerchief which one of the men had taken
from his neck. He sat staring at the rocky shore, the white gleaming
lighthouse, the long ridge of heathy ground on the crest of the hill,
the villas, the gardens with their glow of light and colour, the dark
masses of foliage clustering here and there amidst the bright-hued
rocks. He looked at everything except his dead wife, lying almost at
his feet.
* * * * *
There was an inquiry that evening before the Juge d’Instruction at
Villefranche, and he was made to give an account of his wife’s death.
He proved a very bad witness. The minute and seemingly frivolous
questions addled his brain. He told the magistrate how he had looked
round and found the path empty: but he could not say how his wife
had fallen—whether she had flung herself over the edge or had fallen
accidentally, whether her foot had slipped unawares, whether she had
fallen face forward, or whether she had dropped backwards from the edge
of the cliff.
“I tell you again that I did not see her fall,” he protested
impatiently.
“Did you usually walk in advance of your wife?” asked the Frenchman.
“It was not very polite to turn your back upon a lady.”
“I was worried, and out of temper.”
“For what reason?”
“My wife’s unhappy jealousy created reasons where there were none. The
people who know me know that I was not habitually unkind to her.”
“Yet you gave her an answer which so maddened her that she flung
herself over the cliff in her despair?”
“I fear that it was so,” he answered, with the deepest distress
depicted in his haggard face. “She was in a nervous and irritable
condition. I had always borne that fact in mind until that moment.
She stung me past endurance by her groundless jealousies. I had been
a true and loyal husband to her from the hour of our marriage. I had
never wronged her by so much as a thought; and yet I could not talk
to a pretty peasant-girl, or confess my admiration for any woman I
met in society, without causing an outbreak of temper that was almost
madness. I bore with her long and patiently. I remembered that the
circumstances of her childhood and youth had been adverse, that her
nature had been warped and perverted; I forgave all faults of temper in
a wife who loved me; but this afternoon—almost for the first time since
our marriage—I spoke unkindly, cruelly perhaps. I have no wish to avoid
interrogation, or to conceal any portion of the truth.”
“You did not push her over the cliff?”
“I did not. Do I look like a murderer, or bear the character of a man
likely to commit murder?”
The examination went on, with cruel reiteration of almost the same
questions. The Juge d’Instruction was a hard-headed legal machine,
who believed that the truth might be wrung out of any criminal by
persistent questioning. He suspected Ransome, or deemed it his duty to
suspect him, and he ordered him to be arrested on leaving the court; so
George Ransome passed the night after his wife’s death in the lock-up
at Villefranche.
What a night that was for a man to live through! He sat on a stone
bench, listening to the level plish-plash of that tideless sea ever so
far beneath him. He heard the footsteps going up and down the steep
stony street of that wonderful old seaport; he heard the scream of the
gulls and the striking of the clock on the crest of the hill as he sat
motionless, with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands,
brooding over that swift, sudden horror of yesterday.
Could it have been an accident? Did she step backwards unawares and
slip over the edge? No; he remembered where she was standing when he
last looked at her, some distance from the side of the cliff, standing
among the heather and wild thyme which grew down to the edge of the
little path. She must have made a rapid rush to the brink after that
fatal speech of his. She had flung her life away in a single impulse
of blind, mad anger—or despair. She had not paused for an instant to
take thought. Alas! he knew her so well; he had so often seen those
sudden gusts of passion; the rush of crimson to the pale small face;
the quivering lips striving impotently for speech; the fury in the
dark eyes, and the small nervous hands clenched convulsively. He had
seen her struggle with the demon of anger, and had seen the storm pass
swifter than a tempest-driven cloud across the moon. Another moment
and she would burst into tears, fling her arms round his neck, and
implore him to forgive her.
“I love you too well ever to know happiness,” she said.
That was her favourite apology.
“It is only people without passions who can be happy,” she told him
once. “I sometimes think that you belong to that family.”
And she was dead; she whose undisciplined love had so plagued and tried
him, she was dead; and he felt himself her murderer.
Alas! doubly a murderer, since she had perished just at that time when
her life should have been most precious to him, when he should have
made any sacrifice to secure her peace. He who had seen all the evils
of a fretful temper exhibited in her character had yet been weak enough
to yield to a moment of anger, and to insult the woman whom he ought to
have cherished.
A long-familiar line of Byron’s haunted his brain all through the
night, and mixed itself with that sound of footsteps on the street of
stairs, and the scream of the gulls, and the flapping of the waves
against the stone quay.
“She died, but not alone—”
She who was to have been the mother of his first-born child was lying
dead in the white-walled villa where they had once been happy.
Hush! In the soft clear light of an April morning he heard the tolling
of the church bell, solemn, slow, measured, at agonising intervals,
which left an age of expectancy between the heavy strokes of the
clapper.
_Vivos voco, mortuos plango._
They bury their dead at daybreak in that fair land of orange and
lemon groves. In the early morning of the first day after death, the
hastily-fashioned coffin was carried out into the sunshine, and the
funeral procession wound slowly up the hill towards the graveyard
near the church of Villefranche. George Ransome knew how brief is the
interval between death and burial on that southern shore, and he had
little doubt that the bell was tolling for her whose heart was beating
passionately when the sun began to sink.
So soon! Her grave would be filled in and trodden down before they let
him out of prison.
It had never seemed to him that he was to stay long in captivity, or
that there could be any difficulty in proving his innocence of any
part in the catastrophe, except that fatal part of having upset the
balance of a weak mind, and provoked a passionate woman to suicide. As
for the confinement of the past night, he had scarcely thought about
it. He had a curious semi-consciousness of time and place which was a
new experience to him. He found himself forgetting where he was and
what had happened. There were strange gaps in his mind—intervals of
oblivion—and then there were periods in which he sat looking at the
slanting shaft of sunlight between the window and the ground, and
trying to count the motes that danced in that golden haze.
The day passed strangely, too—sometimes at railroad pace, sometimes
with a ghastly slowness. Then came a night in which sleep never visited
his eyelids—a night of bodily and mental restlessness, the greater part
of which he spent in futile efforts to open the heavily-bolted door,
or to drag the window-bars from their stone sockets. His prison was a
relic of the Middle Ages, and Hercules himself could not have got out
of it.
In all those endeavours he was actuated by a blind impulse—a feverish
desire to be at large again. Not once during that night did he think
of his dead wife in her new-made grave on the side of the hill. He had
forgotten why they had shut him up in that stony chamber—or rather had
imagined another reason for his imprisonment.
He was a political offender—had been deeply concerned in a plot to
overthrow Victor Emanuel, and to create a Republic for Italy. He
himself was to be President of that Republic. He felt all the power to
rule and legislate for a great nation. He compared himself with Solon
and with Pericles, to the disadvantage of both. There was a greatness
in him which neither of those had ever attained.
“I should rule them as God Himself,” he thought. “It would be a golden
age of truth and justice—a millennium of peace and plenty. And while
the nations are waiting for me I am shut up here by the treachery of
France.”
Next morning he was taken before the Juge d’Instruction for the second
time. The two fishermen who picked up his wife’s corpse were present as
witnesses; also his wife’s maid, and the three other servants; also his
wife’s doctor.
He was again questioned severely, but this time nothing could induce
him to give a direct answer to any question. He raved about the Italian
Republic, of which he was to be chief. He told the French magistrate
that France had conspired with the Italian tyrant to imprison and
suppress him.
“Every other pretence is a subterfuge,” he said. “My popularity in
Italy is at the root of this monstrous charge. There will be a rising
of the whole nation if you do not instantly release me. For your own
sake, sir, I warn you to be prompt.”
“This man is pretending to be mad,” said the magistrate.
“I fear there is more reality than pretence about the business,” said
the doctor.
He took Ransome to the window, and looked at his eyes in the strong
white light of noon. Then he went over to the magistrate, and they
whispered together for some minutes, while the prisoner sat staring at
the floor and muttering to himself.
After that there came a long dark interval in George Ransome’s life—a
waking dream of intolerable length, but not unalloyed misery; for the
hallucinations which made his madness buoyed him up and sustained
him during some part of that dark period. He talked with princes
and statesmen; he was not alone in the madhouse chamber, or in the
madhouse garden, or in that great iron cage where even the most
desperate maniacs were allowed to disport themselves in the air and
the sunlight as in a gymnasium. He was surrounded by invisible friends
and flatterers, by public functionaries who quailed before his glance
and were eager to obey his commands. Sometimes he wrote letters and
telegrams all day long upon any scraps of paper which his keepers would
give him; sometimes he passed whole days in a dreamy silence with arms
folded, and abstracted gaze fixed on the distant hill-tops, like
Napoleon at St. Helena, brooding over the future of nations.
By and by there came a period of improvement, or what was called
improvement by the doctors, but which to the patient seemed a time of
strange blankness and disappointment. All those busy shadows which
had peopled his life, his senators and flatterers, had abandoned him;
he was alone in that strange place amidst a strange people, most of
whom seemed to be somewhat wrong in their heads. He was able to read
the newspapers now, and was vexed to find that his speeches were
unreported, his letters and manifestoes unpublished; disappointed to
find that Victor Emanuel was still King of Italy and the new Republic
still a web of dreams.
His temper was very fitful at this time, and he had intervals of
violence. One morning he found himself upon the hills, digging with
half-a-dozen other men, young and old, dressed pretty much like
himself. It was in the early summer morning, before the sun had made
the world too hot for labour. It was rapture to him to be there,
digging and running about on the dewy hillside, in an amphitheatre of
mountains, high above the stony bed of the Paillon. The air was full
of sweet odours, orange and lemon bloom, roses and lilies, from the
gardens and orchards below. He felt that earth and sky were rapturously
lovely, that life was a blessing and a privilege beyond all words. He
had not the consciousness of a single care, or even a troubled memory.
His quarrel with his father, his self-imposed exile, his marriage and
its bitter disillusions, his wife’s tragical fate: all were forgotten.
He felt as a sylph might feel—a creature without earthly obligations,
revelling in the glory of Nature.
This new phase of being lasted so long as the hills and the sky wore
their aspect of novelty. It was succeeded by a period of deepest
depression, a melancholy which weighed him down like a leaden burden.
He sat in the madhouse garden apart from the rest, brooding over the
darkness of life. He had no hopes, no desires.
Gradually memory began to return. He asked why his wife did not come to
see him. “She used to be so fond of me,” he said, “foolishly fond of
me; and now she deserts me.”
Then he talked of going home again. The image of his latest
dwelling-place had gradually shaped itself in his mind. He saw the
hedges of pale amber roses, the carouba-trees, dark against the
glittering blue of the sea, which shone through every opening in the
branches like a background of lapis lazuli, and the rugged mountains
rising above the low curving shore steeply towards the sky, with
patches of olive here and there on their stony flanks, but for the most
part bare and barren, reddish-yellow, steeped in sunlight.
Yes, he remembered every feature of that lovely and varied scene. The
village of Eza yonder on the mountain-road—a cluster of stony dwellings
perched upon rocky foundations, hardly to be distinguished from the
rough crags upon which they were built—and higher still, in a cleft
of those yellow hills, Turbia, and its cloven towers, the birthplace
of Roman Emperors. How lovely it all was, and how pleasant it had
been to lounge in his garden, where the light looked dazzling on beds
of white gilly-flowers, and where the blue summer sea smiled in the
far distance, with a faint purple cloud yonder on the horizon which
represented Corsica!
Why had he ever left that familiar home? Why could he not return to it?
“Get me a carriage,” he said to one of the attendants; “I want to go
home immediately. My wife is waiting for me.”
It is not customary to make explanations to patients even in the
best-regulated asylums. Nobody answered him; nobody explained anything
to him. He found himself confronted with a dogged silence. He wore
himself out in an agony of impatience, like a bird beating itself to
death against its bars. He languished in a miserable ignorance, piecing
his past life together bit by bit, with a strange interweaving of
fancies and realities, until by slow degrees the fancies dropped out of
the web and left him face to face with the truth.
At last the record of the past was complete. He knew that his wife
was dead, and remembered how she had died. He knew that he had been a
prisoner, first in gaol and then in a lunatic asylum; but he did not
acknowledge to himself that he had been mad. He remembered the bell
tolling in the saffron light of dawn; he remembered the magistrate’s
exasperating questions; he remembered everything.
After this he sank into a state of sullen despair, and silence and
apathy were accepted as the indications of cure. He was told by the
head physician that he could leave the institution whenever he pleased.
There was an account against him as a private patient, which had been
guaranteed by his landlord, who knew him to be a man of some means. His
German man-servant had been to the asylum many times to inquire about
him. The doctor recommended him to travel—in Switzerland—until the end
of the autumn, and to take his servant as his attendant and courier.
“Change of air and scene will be of inestimable advantage to you,” said
the doctor; “but it would not be wise for you to travel alone.”
“What month is it?”
“August—the twenty-second.”
“And my wife died early in April,” he said. “Only a few months; and I
feel as if I had been in this place a century.”
He took the doctor’s advice. He cared very little where he went or
what became of him. Life and the world, his own individuality, and the
beautiful earth around and about him were alike indifferent to him. He
went back to the villa at St. Jean, and to the garden he had loved so
well in the bright fresh spring-time. All things had an overgrown and
neglected look in the ripeness of expiring summer; too many flowers,
a rank luxuriance of large leaves and vivid blossoms—fruit rotting in
the long grass—an odour of decaying oranges, the waste of the last
harvest. He went up to the graveyard on the hill above the harbour. It
was not a picturesque burial-place. The cemetery at Cimies was far more
beautiful. The cemetery at Nice was in a grander position.
He felt sorry that she should lie here, amidst the graves of sailors
and fishermen—as even if after death she were slighted and hardly used.
He was summoned back to England early in the following year to his
mother’s death-bed. Neither she nor any of his family had known the
miserable end of his married life. They knew only that he had married,
and had lost his wife after a year of marriage. Hazard had not brought
any one belonging to him in contact with any of those few people who
knew the details of that tragical story.
His mother’s death made him rich and independent, but until the hour he
met Mildred Fausset his life was a blank.
CHAPTER V.
THE GRAVE ON THE HILL.
After that visit to the great white barrack on the road to St. André,
Mildred felt that her business at Nice was finished, there was nothing
more for her to learn. She knew all the sad story now—all, except
those lights and shadows of the picture which only the unhappy actor
in that domestic tragedy could have told her. The mystery of the past
had unfolded itself, stage by stage, from that Sunday afternoon when
César Castellani came to Enderby Manor, and out of trivial-seeming
talk launched a thunderbolt. The curtain was lifted. There was no more
to be done. And yet Mildred lingered at Nice, loving the place and
its environs a little for their own beauty, and feeling a strange and
sorrowful interest in the scene of her husband’s misfortunes.
There was another reason for remaining in the gay white city in the
fact that Lady Lochinvar had taken a fancy to Miss Ransome, and that
the young lady seemed to be achieving a remarkably rapid cure of her
infatuation for the Italian. It may have been because at the Palais
Montano she met a good many Italians, and that the charm of that
nationality became less potent with familiarity. There was music, too,
at the Palais, and to spare, according to Mr. Stuart, who was not an
enthusiast, and was wont to shirk his aunt’s musical reunions.
Mildred was delighted to see her husband’s niece entering society under
such agreeable auspices. She went out with her occasionally, just
enough to make people understand that she was not indifferent to her
niece’s happiness; and for the rest, Lady Lochinvar and Mrs. Murray
were always ready to chaperon the frank, bright girl, who was much
admired by the best people, and was never at a loss for partners at
dances, whoever else might play wallflower.
Mrs. Greswold invited Mr. and Mrs. Murray and Malcolm Stuart to a quiet
little dinner at the Westminster, and the impression the young man
made upon Mildred’s mind was altogether favourable. He was certainly
not handsome, but his plainness was of an honest Scottish type, and
his freckled complexion and blue eyes, sandy hair and moustache,
were altogether different from the traditionary Judas colouring of
Castellani’s auburn beard and hazel eyes. Truth and honesty beamed in
the Scotchman’s open countenance. He looked every inch a soldier and a
gentleman.
That he admired Pamela was obvious to the most unobservant eye; that
she affected to look down upon him was equally obvious; but it might
be that her good-humoured scorn of him was more pretence than reality.
She made light of him openly as one of that inferior race of men whose
minds never soar above the stable, the gunroom, or the home-farm, and
whose utmost intellectual ingenuity culminates in the invention of a
salmon-fly or the discovery of a new fertiliser for turnip-fields.
“You are just like my brother-in-law, Henry Mountford,” she told him.
“From the air with which you say that, I conclude Sir Henry Mountford
must be a very inferior person.”
“Not at all. He is the kind of man whom all other men seem to respect.
I believe he is one of the best shots in England. His bags are written
about in the newspapers; and I wonder there are any pigeons left in the
world, considering the way he has slaughtered them.”
“I saw him shoot at Monte Carlo the year before last.”
“Yes; he went there and back in a week on purpose to shoot. Imagine any
man coming to this divine Riviera, this land of lemon-groves and palms,
and roses and violets, just to slaughter pigeons!”
“He won the Grand Prix. It was a pretty big feather in his cap,” said
Mr. Stuart. “Am I to conclude that you dislike sporting men?”
“I prefer men who cultivate their minds.”
“Ah, but a man who shoots well and rides straight, and can play a
big salmon, and knows how to manage a farm, cannot be altogether an
imbecile. I never knew a really fine rider yet who was a fool. Good
horsemanship needs so many qualities that fools don’t possess; and to
be a crack shot, I assure you that a man must have some brains and a
good deal of perseverance; and perseverance is not a bad thing in its
way, Miss Ransome.”
He looked at her with a certain significance in his frank blue eyes,
looked at her resolutely, as some bold young Vandal or Visigoth might
have looked at a Roman maiden whom he meant to subjugate.
“I did not say that sportsmen were fools,” she answered sharply. “I
only say that the kind of man I respect is the man whose pleasures are
those of the intellect—who is in the front rank among the thinkers of
his age—who—”
“Reads Darwin and the German metaphysicians, I suppose. I tried Darwin
to see if he would help me in my farming, but I can’t say I got very
much out of him in that line. There’s more in old Virgil for an
agriculturist. I’m not a reading man, you see, Miss Ransome. I find by
the time I’ve read the daily papers my thirst for knowledge is pretty
well satisfied. There’s such a lot of information in the London papers,
and when you add the _Figaro_ and the _New York Herald_, there’s not
much left for a man to learn. I generally read the Quarterlies—as a
duty—to discover how many dull books have enriched the world during the
previous three months.”
“That’s a great deal more reading than my brother-in-law gets through.
He makes a great fuss about his _Times_ every morning; but I believe
he seldom goes beyond the births, marriages, and deaths, or a report
of a billiard match. He reads the _Field_, as a kind of religion, and
_Baily’s Magazine_; and I think that’s all.”
“Do you like men who write books, Miss Ransome, as well as men who read
them?”
Pamela crimsoned to the roots of her hair at this most innocent
question. Malcolm Stuart marked that blush with much perplexity.
“When one is interested in a book one likes to know the author,” she
replied, with cautious vagueness.
“Do you know many writers?”
“Not many—in fact, only one.”
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Castellani, the author of _Nepenthe_.”
“_Nepenthe?_—ah, that’s a novel people were talking about some time
ago. My aunt was full of it, because she fancied it embodied some of
her own ideas. She wanted me to read it. I tried a few chapters,” said
Malcolm, making a wry face. “Sickly stuff.”
“People who are not in the habit of reading the literature of
imagination can hardly understand such a book as _Nepenthe_,” replied
Pamela severely. “They are out of touch with the spirit and the
atmosphere of the book.”
“One has to be trained up to that kind of thing, I suppose. One must
forget that two and two make four, in order to get into the proper
frame of mind, eh? Is the author of _Nepenthe_ an interesting man?”
He was shrewd enough to interpret the blush aright. The author of
_Nepenthe_ was a person to be dreaded by any aspirant to Miss Ransome’s
favour.
“He is like his book,” answered Pamela briefly.
“Is he a young man?”
“I don’t know your idea of youth. He is older than my aunt—about
five-and-thirty.”
Stuart was just thirty. One point in his favour, anyhow, he told
himself, not knowing that to a romantic girl years may be interesting.
“Handsome?”
“_That_ is always a matter of opinion. He is just the kind of man who
ought to have written _Nepenthe_. That is really all I can tell you,”
said Pamela, with some irritation. “I believe Lady Lochinvar knew Mr.
Castellani when he was a very young man. She can satisfy your curiosity
about him.”
“I am not curious. Castellani? An Italian, I suppose, one of my aunt’s
innumerable geniuses. She has a genius for discovering geniuses. When I
see her with a new one, I am always reminded of a child with a little
coloured balloon. So pretty—till it bursts!”
Pamela turned her back upon him in a rage, and went over to the
piano to talk to Mrs. Murray, who was preparing to sing one of her
_répertoire_ of five Scotch ballads.
“Shall it be ‘Gin a body’ or ‘Huntingtower’?” she asked meekly; and
nobody volunteering a decisive opinion, she chirruped the former
coquettish little ballad, and put a stop to social intercourse for
exactly four minutes and a half.
After that evening Mr. Stuart knew who his rival was, and with what
kind of influence he had to contend. An author, a musical man, a
genius! Well, he had very few weapons with which to fight such an
antagonist, he who was neither musical, nor literary, nor gifted with
any of the graces which recommend a lover to a sentimental girl.
But he was a man, and he meant to win her. He admired her for her
frank young prettiness, so unsophisticated and girlish, and for that
perfect freshness and truthfulness of mind which made all her thoughts
transparent. He was too much a man of the world to ignore the fact
that Miss Ransome of Mapledown would be a very good match for him,
or that such a marriage would strengthen his position in his aunt’s
esteem. Women bow down to success. Encouraged by these considerations,
Mr. Stuart pursued the even tenor of his way, and was not disheartened
by the idea of the author of _Nepenthe_, more especially as that
attractive personage was not on the ground. He had one accomplishment
over and above the usual outdoor exercises of a country gentleman. He
could dance, and he was Pamela’s favourite partner wherever she went.
No one else waltzed as well. Not even the most gifted of her German
acquaintance; not even the noble Spaniards who were presented to her.
He had another and still greater advantage in the fact that he was
often in the young lady’s society. She was fond of Lady Lochinvar, and
spent a good deal of her life at the Palais Montano, where, with Mrs.
Murray’s indefatigable assistance, there were tennis-parties twice a
week. That charming garden, with its numerous summer-houses, made a
kind of club for the privileged few who were permitted _les petites
entrées_.
While Pamela was enjoying the lovely springtide amongst people whose
only thought was of making the best of life, and getting the maximum
of sunshine, Mildred Greswold spent her days in sad musings upon an
irrevocable past. It was her melancholy pleasure to revisit again and
again the place in which her husband had lived, the picturesque little
village under the shadow of the tall cliff, every pathway which he must
have trodden, every point from which he must have gazed across the bay,
seaward or landward in his troubled reveries.
She dwelt with morbid persistence on the thought of those two lives,
both dear to her, yet in their union how terrible a curse! She
revisited the villa until the old caretaker grew to look upon her as a
heaven-sent benefactress, and until the village children christened her
the English Madonna, that pensive look recalling the face of the statue
in the church yonder, so mildly sad, a look of ineffable sweetness
tinged with pain. She sat for hours at a stretch in the sunlit garden,
amongst such flowers as must have been blooming there in those closing
hours of Fay’s wedded life, when the shadow of her cruel fate was
darkening round her, though she knew it not. She talked to people
who had known the English lady. Alas! they were all dubious in their
opinions. None would answer boldly for the husband’s innocence. They
shrugged their shoulders—they shook their heads. Who could say? Only
the good God would ever know the truth about that story.
The place to which she went oftenest in those balmy afternoons was the
burial-ground on the hill, where Fay’s grave, with its white marble
cross, occupied one of the highest points in the enclosure, and stood
out sharp and clear against the cloudless sapphire.
The inscription on that marble was of the briefest:
“VIVIEN RANSOME.
Died April 24th, 1868.
Eternally lamented.”
Below the cross stretched the grass mound, without shrub or flower.
It was Mildred’s task to beautify this neglected grave. She brought a
florist from the neighbourhood to carry out her own idea, and on her
instruction he removed the long, rank grass from the mound, and planted
a cross of roses, eight feet long, dwarf bush-roses closely planted,
Gloire de Dijon and Maréchal Niel.
She remembered how Fay had revelled in the rose-garden at The Hook,
where midsummer was a kind of carnival of roses. Here the roses would
bloom all the year round, and there would be perpetual perfume and
blossom and colour above poor Fay’s cold dust.
CHAPTER VI.
PAMELA CHANGES HER MIND.
Lucifer himself, after his fall, could not have felt worse than César
Castellani when he followed Mildred Greswold to Nice, as he did within
a week after she left Pallanza.
He went to Nice partly because he was an idle man, and had no desire
to go back to English east winds just when the glory of the southern
springtide was beginning. He was tolerably well furnished with money,
and Nice was as good to him as any other place, while the neighbourhood
of Monte Carlo was always an attraction. He followed in Mildred’s
footsteps, therefore; but he had no idea of forcing himself upon her
presence for some time to come. He knew that his chances were ruined in
that quarter for the time being, if not for ever.
This was his first signal overthrow. Easy conquests had so demoralised
him that he had grown to consider all conquests easy. He had unlimited
faith in the charm of his own personality—his magnetic power, as he
called it: and, behold! his magnetic power had failed utterly with this
lovely, lonely woman, who should have turned to him in her desolation
as the flowers turn to the sun.
For once in his life he had overrated himself and his influence; and in
so doing he had lost the chance of a very respectable alliance.
“Fifteen hundred a year would be at least bread and cheese,” he
reflected, “and to marry an English heiress of a good old family would
solidify my position in society. The girl is pretty enough, and I could
twist her round my finger. She would bore me frightfully; but every man
must suffer something. There is always a discord somewhere amidst the
harmony of life; and if one’s teeth are not too often set on edge by
that false note, one should be content.”
He remembered how contemptuously he had rejected the idea of such a
marriage in his talk with Miss Fausset, and how she had been set upon
it.
“I should stand ever so much better with her if I married well, and
solidified myself into British respectability. I might naturalise
myself, and go into Parliament perhaps, if that would please the good
soul at Brighton. What will she leave me when she dies, I wonder?
She is muter than the Sphinx upon that point. And will she ever die?
Brighton is famous for pauper females of ninety and upwards. A woman
like Miss Fausset, who lives in cotton-wool, and who has long done with
the cares and passions of life, might go well into a second century.
I don’t see any brilliancy in the prospect _there_; but so long as I
please her and do well in the world she will no doubt be generous.”
He told himself that it was essential he should make some concession to
Miss Fausset’s prejudices now that he had failed with Mildred. So long
as he had hoped to win that nobler prize he had been careless how he
jeopardised the favour of his elderly patroness. But now he felt that
her favour was all in all to him, and that the time for trifling was
past.
She had been very generous to him during the years that had gone by
since she first came to his aid almost unasked, and helped him to pay
his college debts. She had come to the rescue many times since that
juvenile entanglement, and her patience had been great. Yet she had not
failed to remonstrate with him at every fresh instance of folly and
self-indulgent extravagance. She had talked to him with an unflinching
directness; she had refused further help; but somehow she had always
given way, and the cheque had been written.
Again and again she had warned him that there were limits even to her
forbearance.
“If I saw you working earnestly and industriously, I should not mind,
even if you were a failure,” said his benefactress severely.
“I have worked, and I have produced a book which was _not_ a failure,”
replied César, with his silkiest air.
“One book in a decade of so-called literary life! Did the success of
that book result in the payment of one single debt?”
“Dearest lady, would you have a man waste his own earnings—the
first-fruits of his pen—the grains of fairy gold that filtered through
the mystic web of his fancy—would you have him fritter away that sacred
product upon importunate hosiers or vindictive bootmakers? _That_
money was altogether precious to me. I kept it in my waistcoat pocket
as long as ever I could. The very touch of the coin thrilled me. I
believe cabmen and crossing-sweepers had most of it in the long-run,”
he concluded, with a remorseful sigh.
Miss Fausset had borne with his idleness and his vanity, as indulgent
mothers bear with their sons; but he felt that she was beginning
to tire of him. There were reasons why she should always continue
forbearing; but he wanted to insure himself something better than
reluctant subsidies.
These considerations being taken into account, Mr. Castellani was fain
to own to himself that he had been a fool in rejecting the substance
for the shadow, however alluring the lovely shade might be.
“But I loved her,” he sighed; “I loved her as I had never loved until I
saw her fair Madonna face amidst the century-old peace of her home. She
filled my life with a new element. She purified and exalted my whole
being. And she is thrice as rich as that prattling girl!”
He ground his teeth at the remembrance of his failure. There had
been no room for doubt. Those soft violet eyes had been transformed
by indignation, and had flashed upon him with angry fire. That fair
Madonna face had whitened to marble with suppressed passion. Not by one
glance, not by one tremor in the contemptuous voice, had the woman he
loved acknowledged his influence.
He put up at the Cosmopolitan, got in half-a-dozen French novels of
the most advanced school from Galignani’s Library, and kept himself
very close for a week or two; but he contrived to find out what the
ladies at the Westminster were doing through Albrecht the courier,
who believed him to be Miss Ransome’s suitor, and was inclined to be
communicative, after being copiously treated to bocks, or _petits
verres_, as the case might be.
From Albrecht, Castellani heard how Miss Ransome spent most of her
time at the Palais Montano, or gadding about with her ladyship and
Mrs. Murray; how, in Albrecht’s private opinion, the balls and other
dissipations of Nice were turning that young lady’s head; how Mrs.
Greswold went for lonely drives day after day, and would not allow
Albrecht to show her the beauties of the neighbourhood, which it
would have been alike his duty and pleasure to have done. He had
ascertained that her favourite, and, indeed, habitual, drive was to
St. Jean, where she was in the habit of leaving the fly at the little
inn while she strolled about the village in a purposeless manner. All
this appeared to Albrecht as eccentric and absurd, and beneath a lady
of Mrs. Greswold’s position. She would have employed her time to more
advantage in going on distant excursions in a carriage and pair, and
in lunching at remote hotels, where Albrecht would have been sure of a
_bonne main_ from a gratified landlord, as well as his commission from
the livery-stable.
Castellani heard with displeasure of Pamela’s dancings and junketings,
and he told himself that it was time to throw himself across her
pathway. He had not been prepared to find that she could enjoy life
without him. Her admiration of him had been so transparent, her
sentimental fancy so naïvely revealed, that he had believed himself the
sultan of her heart, having only to throw the handkerchief whenever it
might suit him to claim his prey. Much as he prided himself upon his
knowledge of human nature, as exemplified in the softer sex, he had
never estimated the fickleness of a shallow sentimental character like
Pamela’s. No man with a due regard to the value and dignity of his sex
could conceive the ruthless rapidity with which a young lady of this
temperament will transfer her affections and her large assortment of
day-dreams and romantic fancies from one man to another. No man could
conceive her capacity for admiring in Number Two all those qualities
which were lacking in Number One. No man could imagine the exquisite
adaptability of girlhood to surrounding circumstances.
Had Castellani taken Miss Ransome when she was in the humour, he would
have found her the most amiable and yielding of wives; a model English
wife, ready to adapt herself in all things to the will and the pleasure
of her husband; unselfish, devoted, unassailable in her belief in
her husband as the first and best of men. But he had not seized his
opportunity. He had allowed nearly a month to go by since his defeat
at Pallanza, and he had allowed Pamela to discover that life might be
endurable, nay, even pleasant, without him.
And now, hearing that the young lady was gadding about, and divining
that such gadding was the high-road to forgetfulness, Mr. Castellani
made up his mind to resume his sway over Miss Ransome’s fancy without
loss of time. He called upon a dashing American matron whom he had
visited in London and Paris, and who was now the occupant of a villa
on the Promenade des Anglais, and in her drawing-room he fell in with
several of his London acquaintances. He found, however, that his
American friend, Mrs. Montagu W. Brown, had not yet succeeded in being
invited to the Palais Montano, and only knew Lady Lochinvar and Miss
Ransome by sight.
“Her ladyship is too stand-offish for my taste,” said Mrs. Montagu
Brown, “but the girl seems friendly enough—no style—not as we Americans
understand style. I am told she ranks as an heiress on this side, but
at the last ball at the Cercle she wore a frock that I should call dear
at forty dollars. That young Stuart is after her, evidently. I hope you
are going to the dance next Tuesday, Mr. Castellani? I want some one
nice to talk to now my waltzing days are over.”
Castellani protested that Mrs. Montagu Brown was in the very heyday of
a dancer’s age, and would be guilty of gross cruelty to terpsichorean
society in abandoning that delightful art.
“You make me tired,” said Mrs. Montagu Brown, with perfect good-humour.
“There are plenty of women who don’t know when they’re old, but I
calculate every woman knows when she weighs a hundred and sixty pounds.
When my waist came to twenty-six inches I knew it was time to leave off
waltzing; and I was pretty good at it, too, in my day, I can tell you.”
“With that carriage you must have been divine,” replied César; “and I
believe the cestus of the Venus de Milo must measure over twenty-six
inches.”
“The Venus de Milo has no more figure than the peasant-women one sees
on the promenade, women who seem as if they set their faces against
the very idea of a waist. Be sure you get a card for Tuesday. I hate a
dude; but I love to have some smart men about me wherever I go.”
“I shall be there,” said Castellani, bending over his hostess and
imparting a confidential pressure to her fat white hand by way of
leave-taking, before he slipped silently from the room.
He had studied the art of departure as if it were a science: never
lingered, never hummed and hawed; never said he must go and didn’t;
never apologised for going so soon while everybody was pining to get
rid of him.
The next day there was a battle of flowers; not the great floral fête
before the sugar-plum carnival, but an altogether secondary affair,
pleasant enough in the balmy weather of advancing spring.
Every one of any importance was on the promenade, and among the best
carriages appeared Lady Lochinvar’s barouche, decorated with white
camellias and carmine carnations. She had carefully eschewed that
favourite mixture of camellias and Parma violets which has always a
half-mourning or funereal air. Malcolm Stuart and Miss Ransome sat side
by side on the front seat with a great basket of carnations on their
knees, with which they pelted their acquaintance, while Lady Lochinvar,
in brown velvet and ostrich plumage, reposed at her ease in the back
of the spacious carriage, and enjoyed the fun without any active
participation.
It was Pamela’s first experience in flower-fights, and to her the scene
seemed enchanting. The afternoon was peerless. She wore a white gown,
as if it had been midsummer, and white gowns were the rule in most of
the carriages. The sea was at its bluest, the pink walls and green
shutters, white walls and red roofs, the orange-trees, cactus and palm,
made up a picture of a city in fairyland, taken as a background to a
triple procession of carriages all smothered in Parma violets, Dijon
roses, camellias, and narcissus, with here and there some picturesque
coach festooned with oranges and lemons amidst tropical foliage.
The carriages moved at a foot-pace; the pavements were crowded with
smart people, who joined in the contest. Pamela’s lap was full of
bouquets, which fell from her in showers as she stood up every now and
then to fling a handful of carnations into a passing carriage.
Presently, while she was standing thus, flushed and sparkling, she saw
a familiar figure on the footpath by the sea, and paled suddenly at the
sight.
It was César Castellani, sauntering slowly along, in a short coat of
light-coloured cloth, and a felt hat of exactly the same delicate
shade. He came to the carriage-door. There was a block at the moment,
and he had time to talk to the occupants.
“How do you do, Lady Lochinvar? You have not forgotten me, I hope—César
Castellani—though it is such ages since we met?”
He only lifted his hat to Lady Lochinvar, waiting for her recognition,
but he held out his hand to Pamela.
“How do you like Nice, Miss Ransome? As well as Pallanza, I hope?”
“Ever so much better than Pallanza.”
There was a time when that coat and hat, the _soupçon_ of dark blue
velvet waistcoat just showing underneath the pale buff collar, the
loose China silk handkerchief carelessly fastened with a priceless
intaglio, the gardenia and pearl-gray gloves, would have ensnared
Pamela’s fancy: but that time was past. She thought that César’s
costume looked effeminate and underbred beside the stern simplicity of
Mr. Stuart’s heather-mixture _complet_. The scales had fallen from her
eyes; and she recognised the bad taste and the vanity involved in that
studied carelessness, that artistic combination of colour.
She remembered what Mildred had said of Mr. Castellani, and she was
deliberately cold. Lady Lochinvar was gracious, knowing nothing to the
Italian’s discredit.
“I remember you perfectly,” she said. “You have changed very little
in all these years. Be sure you come and see me. I am at home at five
almost every afternoon.”
The carriage moved on, and Pamela sat in an idle reverie for the next
ten minutes, although the basket of carnations was only half empty.
She was thinking how strange it was that her heart beat no faster.
Could it be that she was cured—and so soon? It was even worse than
a cure; it was a positive revulsion of feeling. She was vexed with
herself for ever having exalted that over-dressed foreigner into
a hero. She felt she had been un-English, unwomanly even, in her
exaggerated admiration of an exotic. And then she glanced at Malcolm
Stuart, and averted her eyes with a conscious blush on seeing him
earnestly observant of her.
He was plain, certainly. His features had been moulded roughly, but
they were not bad features. The lines were rather good, in fact, and
it was a fine manly countenance. He was fair and slightly freckled, as
became a Scotchman; his eyes were clear and blue, but could be compared
to neither sapphires nor violets, and his eyelashes were lighter than
any cultivated young lady could approve. The general tone of his
hair and complexion was ginger; and ginger, taken in connection with
masculine beauty, is not all one would wish. But then ginger is not
uncommon in the service, and it is a hue which harmonises agreeably
with Highland bonnets and tartan. No doubt Mr. Stuart had looked
really nice in his uniform. He had certainly appeared to advantage in
a Highland costume at the fancy ball the other night. Some people had
pronounced him the finest-looking man in the room.
And, again, good looks are of little importance in a man. A plainish
man, possessed of all the manly accomplishments, a dead shot and a
crack rider, can always appear to advantage in English society. Pamela
was beginning to think more kindly of sporting men, and even of Sir
Henry Mountford.
“I’m sure Mr. Stuart would get on with him,” she thought, dimly
foreseeing a day when Sir Henry and her new acquaintance would be
brought together somehow.
César Castellani took immediate advantage of Lady Lochinvar’s
invitation. He presented himself at the Palais Montano on the following
afternoon, and he found Pamela established there as if she belonged to
the house. It was she who poured out the tea, and dispensed those airy
little hot cakes, which were a kind of idealised galette, served in
the daintiest of doyleys, embroidered with Lady Lochinvar’s cipher and
coronet.
Mr. and Mrs. Murray were there, and Malcolm Stuart, the chief charm of
whose society seemed to consist in his exhibition of an accomplished
Dandie Dinmont which usurped the conversation, and which Castellani
would have liked to inocculate then and there with the most virulent
form of rabies. Pamela squatted on a little stool at the creature’s
feet, and assisted in showing him off. She had acquired a power over
him which indicated an acquaintance of some standing.
“What fools girls are!” thought Castellani.
His conquests among women of maturer years had been built upon rock as
compared with the shifting quicksand of a girl’s fancy. He began to
think the genus girl utterly contemptible.
“He has but one fault,” said Pamela, when the terrier had gone through
various clumsy evolutions in which the bandiness of his legs and the
length of his body had been shown off to the uttermost. “He cannot
endure Box, and Box detests him. They never meet without trying to
murder each other, and I’m very much afraid,” bending down to kiss the
broad hairy head, “that Dandie is the stronger.”
“Of course he is. Box is splendid for muscle, but weight must tell in
the long-run,” replied Mr. Stuart.
“My grandmother had a Dandie whose father belonged to Sir Walter
Scott,” began Mrs. Murray: “he was simply a per-r-r-fect dog, and my
mamma—”
Castellani fled from this inanity. He went to the other end of the
room, where Lady Lochinvar was listening listlessly to Mr. Murray, laid
himself out to amuse her ladyship for the next ten minutes, and then
departed without so much as a look at Pamela.
“The spell is broken,” he said to himself, as he drove away. “The girl
is next door to an idiot. No doubt she will marry that sandy Scotchman.
Lady Lochinvar means it, and a silly-pated miss like that can be led
with a thread of floss silk. _Moi je m’en fiche._”
* * * * *
About a week after Mr. Castellani’s reappearance Mildred Greswold
received a letter from Brighton, which made a sudden change in her
plans.
It was from Mr. Maltravers the Incumbent of St. Edmund’s:
“St. Edmund’s Vicarage.
“Dear Mrs. Greswold,—After our thoroughly confidential conversations
last autumn I feel justified in addressing you upon a subject which
I know is very near to your heart, namely, the health and welfare,
spiritual as well as bodily, of your dear aunt and my most valued
parishioner, Miss Fausset. The condition of that dear lady has given
me considerable uneasiness during the last few months. She has refused
to take her hand from the plough; she labours as faithfully as ever
in the Lord’s vineyard; but I see with deepest regret that she is no
longer the woman she was, even a year ago. The decay has been sudden,
and it has been rapid. Her strength begins to fail her, though she
will hardly admit as much, even to her medical attendant, and her
spirits are less equable than of old. She has intervals of extreme
depression, against which the efforts of friendship, the power of
spiritual consolation, are unavailing.
“I feel it my duty to inform you, as one who has a right to be
interested in the disposal of Miss Fausset’s wealth, that my
benefactress has consummated the generosity of past years by a
magnificent gift. She has endowed her beloved Church of St. Edmund
with an income which, taken in conjunction with the pew-rents, an
institution which I hope hereafter to abolish, raises the priest
of the temple from penury to comfort, and affords him the means of
helping the poor of his parish with his alms as well as with his
prayers and ministrations. This munificent gift closes the long
account of beneficence betwixt your dear aunt and me. I have nothing
further to expect from her for my church or for myself. It is fully
understood between us that this gift is final. You will understand,
therefore, that I am disinterested in my anxiety for this precious
life.
“You, dear Mrs. Greswold, are your aunt’s only near relative, and
it is but right you should be the companion and comforter of her
declining days. That the shadow of the grave is upon her I can but
fear, although medical science sees but slight cause for alarm. A
year ago she was a vigorous woman, spare of habit certainly, but with
a hardness of bearing and manner which promised a long life. To-day
she is a broken woman, nervous, fitful, and, I fear, unhappy, though I
can conceive no cause for sadness in the closing years of such a noble
life as hers has been, unselfish, devoted to good works and exalted
thoughts. If you can find it compatible with your other ties to come
to Brighton, I would strongly recommend you to come without loss of
time, and I believe that the change which you will yourself perceive
in my valued friend will fully justify the course I take in thus
addressing you.—I am ever, dear Mrs. Greswold, your friend and servant,
“SAMUEL MALTRAVERS.”
Mildred gave immediate orders to courier and maid, her trunks were
to be packed that afternoon, a _coupé_ was to be taken in the Rapide
for the following day, and the travellers were to go straight through
to Paris. But when she announced this fact to Pamela the damsel’s
countenance expressed utmost despondency.
“Upon my word, aunt, you have a genius for taking one away from a place
just when one is beginning to be happy!” she exclaimed in irrepressible
vexation.
She apologised directly after upon hearing of Miss Fausset’s illness.
“I am a horrid ill-tempered creature,” she said; “but I really am
beginning to adore Nice. It is a place that grows upon one.”
“What if I were to leave you with Lady Lochinvar? She told me the other
day that she would like very much to have you to stay with her. You
might stay till she leaves Nice, which will be in about three weeks’
time, and you could travel with her to Paris. You could go from Paris
to Brighton very comfortably, with Peterson to take care of you.
Perhaps you would not mind leaving Nice when Lady Lochinvar goes?”
Pamela sparkled and blushed at the suggestion.
“I should like it very much, if Lady Lochinvar is in earnest in asking
to have me.”
“I am sure she is in earnest. There is only one stipulation I must
make, Pamela. You must promise me not to renew your intimacy with Mr.
Castellani.”
“With all my heart, aunt. My eyes have been opened. He is thoroughly
bad style.”
CHAPTER VII.
AS THE SANDS RUN DOWN.
Mildred was in Brighton upon the third day after she left Nice. She had
sent no intimation of her coming to her aunt, lest her visit should
be forbidden. A nervous invalid is apt to have fancies, and to resent
anything that looks like being taken care of. She arrived, therefore,
unannounced, left her luggage at the station, and drove straight to
Lewes Crescent, where the butler received her with every appearance of
surprise.
It was early in the afternoon, and Miss Fausset was sitting in her
accustomed chair in the back drawing-room, near the fire, with her
book-table on her right hand. The balmy spring-time which Mildred had
left at Nice had not yet visited Brighton, where the season had been
exceptionally cold, and where a jovial north-easter was holding his
revels all over Kemp Town, and enlivening the cold gray sea. A pleasant
bracing day for robust health and animal spirits; but not altogether
the kind of atmosphere to suit an elderly spinster suffering from
nervous depression.
Miss Fausset started up, flushed with surprise, at Mildred’s entrance.
Her niece had kept her acquainted with her movements, but had told her
nothing of the drama of her existence since she left Brighton.
“My dear child, I am very glad to see you back,” she said gently. “You
are come to stay with me for a little while, I hope, before—”
She hesitated, and looked at Mildred earnestly.
“Are you reconciled to your husband?” she asked abruptly, as if with
irrepressible anxiety.
“Reconciled?” echoed Mildred; “we have never quarrelled. He is as dear
to me to-day as he was the day I married him—dearer for all the years
we spent together. But we are parted for ever. You know that it must be
so, and you know why.”
“I hoped that time would have taught you common sense.”
“Time has only confirmed my resolution. Do not let us argue the point,
aunt. I know that you mean kindly, but I know that you are false to
your own principles—to all the teaching of your life—when you argue on
the side of wrong.”
Miss Fausset turned her head aside impatiently. She had sunk back into
her chair after greeting Mildred, and her niece perceived that she, who
used to sit erect as a dart, in the most uncompromising attitude, was
now propped up with cushions, against which her wasted figure leaned
heavily.
“How have you got through the winter, aunt?” Mildred asked presently.
“Not very well. It has tried me more than any other winter I can
remember. It has been a long weary winter. I have been obliged to give
up the greater part of my district work. I held on as long as ever I
could, till my strength failed me. And now I have to trust the work to
others. I have my lieutenants—Emily Newton and her sister—who work for
me. You remember them, perhaps. Earnest good girls. They keep me _en
rapport_ with my poor people; but it is not like personal intercourse.
I begin to feel what it is to be useless—to cumber the ground.”
“My dear aunt, how can you talk so? Your life has been so full of
usefulness that you may well afford to take rest now that your health
is not quite so good as it has been. Even in your drawing-room here
you are doing good. It is only right that young people should carry
out your instructions, and work for you. I have heard, too, of your
munificent gift to St. Edmund’s.”
“It is nothing, my dear. When all is counted, it is nothing. I have
tried to lead a righteous life. I have tried to do good; but now
sitting alone by this fire day after day, night after night, it all
seems vain and empty. There is no comfort in the thought of it all,
Mildred. I have had the praise of men, but never the approval of my own
conscience.”
There was a brief silence, Mildred feeling it vain to argue against
her aunt’s tone of self-upbraiding, unable to fathom the mind which
prompted the words.
“Then you are not going back to your husband?” Miss Fausset asked
abruptly, as if in utter forgetfulness of all that had been said; and
then suddenly recollecting herself, “you have made up your mind, you
say. Well, in that case you can stay with me—make this your home. You
may take up my work, perhaps—by and by.”
“Yes, aunt, I hope I may be able to do so. My life has been idle and
useless since my great sorrow. I want to learn to be of more use in the
world; and you can teach me, if you will.”
“I will, Mildred. I want you to be happy. I have made my will. You will
inherit the greater part of my fortune.”
“My dear aunt, I don’t want—”
“No, you are rich enough already, I know; but I should like you to have
still larger means, to profit by my death. You will use your wealth
for the good of others, as I have tried—feebly tried—to use mine. You
will be rich enough to found a sisterhood, if you like—the Sisters of
St. Edmund. I have done all I mean to do for the Church. Mr. Maltravers
knows that.”
“Dear aunt, why should we talk of these things? You have many years of
life before you, I hope.”
“No, Mildred, the end is not far off. I feel worn out and broken. I am
a doomed woman.”
“But you have had no serious illness since I was here?”
“No, no, nothing specific; only languor and shattered nerves, want of
appetite, want of sleep: the sure indications of decay. My doctor can
find no name for my malady. He tries one remedy after another, until I
weary of his experiments. I am glad you have come to me, Mildred; but I
should be gladder if you were going back to your husband.”
“O, aunt, why do you say things which you know must torture me?”
“Because I am worried by your folly. Well, I will say no more. You
will stay with me and comfort me, if you can. What have you done with
Pamela?”
Mildred told her aunt about Lady Lochinvar’s invitation.
“Ah! she is with Lady Lochinvar. A very frivolous person, I suppose.
Your husband’s niece is a well-meaning silly girl; sure to get into
mischief of some kind. Is she still in love with César Castellani?”
“I think not—I hope not. I believe she is cured of that folly.”
“You call it a folly? Well, perhaps you are right. It may be
foolishness for a girl to follow the blind instinct of her heart.”
“For an impulsive girl like Pamela.”
“Yes, no doubt she is impulsive, generous, and uncalculating; a girl
hardly to be trusted with her own fate,” said Miss Fausset, with a
sigh, and then she lapsed into silence.
Mr. Maltravers had not exaggerated the change in her. It was only too
painfully evident. Her manner and bearing had altered since Mildred
had seen her last. Physically and mentally her nature seemed to have
relaxed and broken down. It was as if the springs that sustained the
human machine had snapped. The whole mechanism was out of gear. She who
had been so firm of speech and meaning, who had been wont to express
herself with a cold and cutting decisiveness, was now feeble and
wailing, repeating herself, harping upon the same old string, obviously
forgetful of that which had gone before.
Mildred felt that she would be only doing her duty in taking up her
abode in the great dull house, and trying to soothe the tedium of
decay. She could do very little, perhaps, but the fact of near kindred
would be in itself a solace, and for her own part she would have the
sense of duty done.
“I will stay with you as long as you will have me, aunt,” she said
gently. “Albrecht is below. May I send to the station for my luggage?”
“Of course, and your rooms shall be got ready immediately. The house
will be yours before very long, perhaps. It would be strange if you
could not make it your home!”
She touched a spring on her book-table, which communicated with the
electric-bell, and Franz appeared promptly.
“Tell them to get Mrs. Greswold’s old rooms ready at once, and send
Albrecht to the station for the luggage,” ordered Miss Fausset, with
something of her old decisiveness. “Louisa is with you, I suppose?” she
added to her niece.
“Louisa is at the station, looking after my things. Albrecht leaves me
to-day. He has been a good servant, and I think he has had an easy
place. I have not been an eager traveller.”
“No; you seem to have taken life at a slow pace. What took you to Nice?
It is not a place I should have chosen if I wanted quiet.”
Mildred hesitated for some moments before she replied to this question.
“You know one part of my sorrow, aunt; and I think I might trust you
with the whole of that sad story. I went to Nice because it was the
place where my husband lived with his first wife—where my unhappy
sister died.”
“She died at Nice?” repeated Miss Fausset, with an abstracted air, as
if her power of attention, which had revived for a little just now,
were beginning to flag.
“She died there, under the saddest circumstances. I am heart-broken
when I think of her and that sad fate. My own dear Fay, how hard that
your loving heart should be an instrument of self-torture! She was
jealous of her husband—causelessly, unreasonably jealous—and she killed
herself in a paroxysm of despair!”
The awfulness of this fact roused Miss Fausset from her apathy. She
started up from amongst her cushions, staring at Mildred in mute
horror, and her wasted hands trembled as they grasped the arm of her
chair.
“Surely, surely that can’t be true!” she faltered. “It is too dreadful!
People tell such lies—an accident, perhaps, exaggerated into a suicide.
An overdose of an opiate!”
“No, no; it was nothing like that. There is no doubt. I heard it from
those who knew. She flung herself over the edge of the cliff; she
was walking with her husband—my husband, George Greswold—then George
Ransome; they were walking together; they quarrelled; he said something
that stung her to the quick, and she threw herself over the cliff. It
was the wild impulse of a moment, for which an all-merciful God would
not hold her accountable. She was in very delicate health, nervous,
hysterical, and she fancied herself unloved, betrayed, perhaps. Ah,
aunt, think how hardly she had been used—cast off, disowned, sent out
alone into the world—by those who should have loved and protected her.
Poor, poor Fay! My mother sent her away from The Hook where she was so
happy. My mother’s jealousy drove her out—a young girl, so friendless,
so lonely, so much in need of love. It was my mother’s doing; but my
father ought not to have allowed it. If she was weak he was strong, and
Fay was his daughter. It was his duty to protect her against all the
world. You know how I loved my father; you know that I reverence his
memory; but he played a coward’s part when he sent Fay out of his house
to please my mother.”
She was carried away by her passionate regret for that ill-used girl
whose image had never lost its hold upon her heart.
“Not a word against your father, Mildred. He was a good man. He never
failed in affection or in duty. He acted for the best according to his
lights in relation to that unhappy girl—unhappy—ill-used—yes, yes, yes.
He did his best, Mildred. He must not be blamed. But it is dreadful to
think that she killed herself.”
“Had you heard nothing of her fate, aunt? My father must have been
told, surely. There must have been some means of communication. He
must have kept himself informed about her fate, although she was
banished, given over to the care of strangers. If he had owned a dog
which other people took care of for him he would have been told when
the dog died.”
Miss Fausset felt the unspeakable bitterness of this comparison.
“You must not speak like that of your father, Mildred. You ought to
know that he was a good man. Yes, he knew, of course, when that poor
girl died, but it was not his business to tell other people. I only
heard incidentally that she had married, and that she died within a
year of her marriage. I heard no more. It was the end of a sad story.”
Again there was an interval of silence. It was six o’clock; the sun was
going down over the sea beyond the West Pier, and the lawn, and the
fashionable garden where the gay world congregates; and this eastern
end of the long white seafront was lapsing into grayness, through
which a star shone dimly here and there. It looked a cold, dull world
after the pink hotel and the green shutters, the dusty palms and the
turquoise sea of the Promenade des Anglais; but Mildred was glad to
be in England, glad to be so much nearer him whose life companion she
could never be again.
Franz brought her some tea presently, and informed her that her rooms
were ready, and that Louisa had arrived with the luggage. Albrecht had
left his humble duty for his honoured mistress, and was gone.
“When your father died, you looked through his papers and letters, no
doubt?” said Miss Fausset presently, after a pause in the conversation.
“Yes, aunt, I looked through my dear father’s letters, and arranged
everything with our old family solicitor, Mr. Cresswell,” answered
Mildred, surprised at a question which seemed to have no bearing upon
anything that had gone before.
“And you found no documents relating to—that unhappy girl?”
“Not a line—not a word. But I had not expected to find anything. The
history of her birth was the one dark secret of my father’s life—he
would naturally leave no trace of the story.”
“Naturally, if he were wiser than most people. But I have observed
that men of business have a passion for preserving documents, even
when they are worthless. People keep compromising papers with the idea
of destroying them on their death-beds, or when they feel the end is
near; and then death comes without warning, and the papers remain. Your
father’s end was somewhat sudden.”
“Sadly sudden. When he left Enderby in the autumn he was in excellent
health. The shooting had been better than usual that year, and I think
he had enjoyed it as much as the youngest of our party. And then
he went back to London, and the London fogs—caught cold, neglected
himself, and we were summoned to Parchment Street to find him dying of
inflammation of the lungs. It was terrible—such a brief farewell, such
an irreparable loss.”
“I was not sent for,” said Miss Fausset severely. “And yet I loved your
father dearly.”
“It was wrong, aunt; but we hoped against hope almost to the last.
It was only within a few hours of the end that we knew the case was
hopeless, and to summon you would have been to give him the idea
that he was dying. George and I pretended that our going to him was
accidental. We were so fearful of alarming him.”
“Well, I daresay you acted for the best; but it was a heavy blow for me
to be told that he was gone—my only brother—almost my only friend.”
“Pray don’t say that, aunt. I hope you know that I love you.”
“My dear, you love me because I am your father’s sister. You consider
it your duty to love me. My brother loved me for my own sake. He was a
noble-hearted man.”
Miss Fausset and her niece dined together _tête-à-tête_, and spent
the evening quietly on each side of the hearth, with their books and
work, the kind of work which encourages pensive brooding, as the needle
travels slowly over the fabric.
“I wonder you have no pets, aunt—no favourite dog.”
“I have never cared for that kind of affection, Mildred. I am of too
hard a nature, perhaps. My heart does not open itself to dogs and cats,
and parrots are my abomination. I am not like the typical spinster.
My only solace in the long weary years has been in going among people
who are more unhappy than myself. I have put myself face to face with
sordid miseries, with heavy life-long burdens; and I have asked myself,
What is _your_ trouble compared with these?”
“Dear aunt, it seems to me that your life must have been particularly
free from trouble and care.”
“Perhaps, in its outward aspect. I am rich, and I have been looked
up to. But do you think those long years of loneliness—the aimless,
monotonous pilgrimage through life—have not been a burden? Do you think
I have not—sometimes, at any rate—envied other women their children and
their husbands—the atmosphere of domestic love, even with its attendant
cares and sorrows? Do you suppose that I could live for a quarter of
a century as I have lived, and not feel the burden of my isolation? I
have made people care for me through their self-interest. I have made
people honour me, because I have the means of helping them. But who is
there who cares for me, Gertrude Fausset?”
“You cannot have done so much for others without being sincerely loved
in return.”
“With a kind of love, perhaps—a love that has been bought.”
“Why did you never marry, aunt?”
“Because I was an heiress and a good match, and distrusted every man
who wanted to marry me. I made a vow to myself, before my twentieth
birthday, that I would never listen to words of love or give
encouragement to a lover; and I most scrupulously kept that vow. I was
called a handsome woman in those days; but I was not an attractive
woman at any time. Nature had made me of too hard a clay.”
“It was a pity that you should keep love at arm’s length.”
“Far better than to have been fooled by shams, as I might have been.
Don’t say any more about it, Mildred. I made my vow, and I kept it.”
Mildred resigned herself quietly to the idea of the dull slow life in
Lewes Crescent. This duty of solacing her aunt’s declining days was the
only duty that remained to her, except that wider duty of caring for
the helpless and the wretched. And she told herself that there could be
no better school in which to learn how to help others than the house of
Miss Fausset, who had given so much of her life to the poor.
She had been told to consider her aunt’s house as her own, and that
she was at liberty to receive Pamela there as much and as often as she
liked. She did not think that Pamela would be long without a settled
home. Mr. Stuart’s admiration and Lady Lochinvar’s wishes had been
obvious; and Mildred daily expected a gushing letter from the fickle
damsel, announcing her engagement to the Scotchman.
At four o’clock on the day after Mildred’s arrival, Miss Fausset’s
friends began to drop in for afternoon tea and talk, and Mildred was
surprised to see how her aunt rallied in that long-familiar society.
It seemed as if the praises and flatteries of these people acted upon
her like strong wine. The languid attitude, the weary expression of
the pale drawn face, were put aside. She sat erect again; her eyes
brightened, her ear was alert to follow three or four conversations
at a time; nothing escaped her. Mildred began to think that she
had lived upon the praises of men rather than upon the approval of
conscience—that these assiduities and flatteries of a very commonplace
circle were essential to her happiness.
Mr. Maltravers came after the vesper service, full of life and
conversation, vigorous, self-satisfied, with an air of Papal dominion
and Papal infallibility, so implicitly believed in by his flock that
he had learned to believe as implicitly in himself. The flock was
chiefly feminine, and worshipped without limit or reservation. There
were husbands and sons, brothers and nephews, who went to church with
their womenkind on Sunday; but these were for the most part without
enthusiasm for Mr. Maltravers. Their idea of public worship went
scarcely beyond considering Sunday morning service a respectable
institution, not to be dispensed with lightly.
Mr. Maltravers welcomed Mildred with touching friendliness.
“I knew you would not fail your aunt in the hour of need,” he said;
“and now I hope you are going to stay with her, and to take up her
work when she lays it down, so that the golden thread of womanly
charity may be unbroken.”
“I hope I may be able to take up her work. I shall stay with her as
long as she needs me.”
“That is well. You found her sadly changed, did you not?”
“Yes, she is much changed. Yet how bright she looks this afternoon!
what interest she takes in the conversation!”
“The flash of the falchion in the worn-out scabbard,” said Mr.
Maltravers.
A layman might have said sword, but Mr. Maltravers preferred falchion,
as a more picturesque word. Half the success of his preaching had lain
in the choice of picturesque words. There were sceptics among his
masculine congregation who said there were no ideas in his sermons;
only fine words, romantic similes—a perpetual recurrence of fountains
and groves, sunset splendours and roseate dawns, golden gates and
starry canopies, seas of glass, harps of gold. But if his female
worshippers felt better and holier after listening to him, what could
one ask more?—and they all declared that it was so. They came out of
church spiritualised, overflowing with Christian love, and gave their
pence eagerly to the crossing-sweepers on their way home.
The dropping in and the tea-drinking went on for nearly two hours.
Mr. Maltravers took four cups of tea, and consumed a good deal of
bread-and-butter, abstaining from the chocolate biscuits and the
poundcake which the ladies of the party affected; abstaining on
principle, as saints and eremites of old abstained from high living.
He allowed himself to enjoy the delicate aroma of the tea and the
delicately-cut bread-and-butter. He was a bachelor, and lived poorly
upon badly-cooked food at his vicarage. His only personal indulgence
was in the accumulation of a theological library, in which all the
books were of a High Church cast.
When the visitors were all gone Miss Fausset sank back into her chair,
white and weary-looking, and Mildred left her to take a little nap
while she went up to her own room, half boudoir, half dressing-room, a
spacious apartment, with a fine seaview. Here she sat in a reverie,
and watched the fading sky and the slow dim stars creeping out one by
one.
Was she really to take up her aunt’s work, to live in a luxurious
home, a lonely loveless woman, and to go out in a methodical, almost
mechanical way so many times a week, to visit among the poor? Would
such a life as that satisfy her in all the long slow years?
The time would come, perhaps, when she would find peace in such a
life—when her heart would know no grief except the griefs of others;
when she would have cast off the fetters of selfish cares and selfish
yearnings, and would stand alone, as saints and martyrs and holy
women of old had stood—alone with God and His poor. There were women
she knew, even in these degenerate days, who so lived and so worked,
seeking no guerdon but the knowledge of good done in this world, and
the hope of the crown immortal. Her day of sacrifice had not yet
come. She had not been able to dissever her soul from the hopes and
sorrows of earth. She had not been able to forget the husband she had
forsaken—even for a single hour. When she knelt down to pray at night,
when she awoke in the morning, her thoughts were with him. “How does he
bear his solitude? Has he learnt to forget me and to be happy?” Those
questions were ever present to her mind.
And now at Brighton, knowing herself so near him, her heart yearned
more than ever for the sight of the familiar face, for the sound of
the beloved voice. She pored over the time-table, and calculated the
length of the journey—the time lost at Portsmouth and Bishopstoke—every
minute until the arrival at Romsey; and then the drive to Enderby. She
pictured the lanes in the early May—the hedgerows bursting into leaf,
the banks where the primroses were opening, the tender young ferns
just beginning to uncurl their feathery fronds, the spearpoints of the
hartstongue shooting up amidst rank broad docks, and lords and ladies,
and the flower on the leafless blackthorn making patches of white
amongst the green.
How easy it was to reach him! how natural it would seem to hasten to
him after half a year of exile! and yet she must not. She had pledged
herself to honour the law; to obey the letter and the spirit of that
harsh law which decreed that her sister’s husband could not be hers.
She knew that he was at Enderby, and she had some ground for supposing
that he was well, and even contented. She had seen the letters which
he had written to his niece. He had written about the shooting, his
horses, his dogs; and there had been no word to indicate that he was
out of health, or in low spirits. Mildred had pored over those brief
letters, forgetting to return them to their rightful owner, cherishing
them as if they made a kind of link between her and the love she had
resigned.
How firm the hand was!—that fine and individual penmanship which she
had so admired in the past—the hand in which her first love-letter
had been written. It was but little altered in fifteen years. She
recalled the happy hour when she received that first letter from her
affianced husband. He had gone to London a day or two after their
betrothal, eager to make all arrangements for their marriage, impatient
for settlements and legal machinery which should make their union
irrevocable, full of plans for immediate improvements at Enderby.
She remembered how she ran out into the garden to read that first
letter—a long letter, though they had been parted less than a day when
it was written. She had gone to the remotest nook in that picturesque
riverside garden, a rustic bower by the water’s edge, an osier arbour
over which her own hands had trained the Céline Forestieri roses.
They were in flower on that happy day—clusters of pale yellow bloom,
breathing perfume round her as she sat beneath the blossoming arch and
devoured her lover’s fond words. O, how bright life had been then for
both of them!—for her without a cloud.
He was well—that was something to know; but it was not enough. Her
heart yearned for fuller knowledge of his life than those letters gave.
Wounded pride might have prompted that cheerful tone. He might wish her
to think him happy and at ease without her. He thought that she had
used him ill. It was natural, perhaps, that he should think so, since
he could not see things as she saw them. He had not her deep-rooted
convictions. She thought of him and wondered about him till the desire
for further knowledge grew into an aching pain. She must write to
some one; she must do something to quiet this gnawing anxiety. In her
trouble she thought of all her friends in the neighbourhood of Enderby;
but there was none in whom she could bring herself to confide except
Rollinson, the curate. She had thought first of writing to the doctor,
but he was something of a gossip, and would be likely to prattle to
his patients about her letter, and her folly in forsaking so good a
husband. Rollinson she felt she might trust. He was a thoughtful young
man, despite his cheery manners and some inclination to facetiousness
of a strictly clerical order. He was one of a large family, and had
known trouble, and Mildred had been especially kind to him and to
the sisters who from time to time had shared his apartments at the
carpenter’s, and had revelled in the gaieties of Enderby parish, the
penny-reading at the schoolhouse, the sale of work for the benefit of
the choir, and an occasional afternoon for tea and tennis at the Manor.
Those maiden sisters of the curate’s had known and admired Lola, and
Mr. Rollinson had been devoted to her from his first coming to the
parish, when she was a lovely child of seven.
Mildred wrote fully and frankly to the curate.
“I cannot enter upon the motive of our separation,” she wrote, “except
so far as to tell you that it is a question of principle which
has parted us. My husband has been blameless in all his domestic
relations, the best of husbands, the noblest of men. Loving him with
all my heart, trusting and honouring him as much as on my wedding-day,
I yet felt it my duty to leave him. I should not make this explanation
to any one else at Enderby, but I wish you to know the truth. If
people ever question you about my reasons you can tell them that it
is my intention ultimately to enter an Anglican Sisterhood, or it
may be to found a Sisterhood, and to devote my declining years to
my sorrowing fellow-creatures. This is my fixed intention, but my
vocation is yet weak. My heart cleaves to the old home and all that I
lost in leaving it.
“And now, my kind friend, I want you to tell me how my husband fares
in his solitude. If he were ill and unhappy he would be too generous
to complain to me. Tell me how he is in health and spirits. Tell me
of his daily life, his amusements, occupations. There is not the
smallest detail which will not interest me. You see him, I hope,
often; certainly you are likely to see him oftener than any one else
in the parish. Tell me all you can, and be assured of my undying
gratitude.—Ever sincerely yours,
MILDRED GRESWOLD.”
Mr. Rollinson’s reply came by return of post:
“I am very glad you have written to me, dear Mrs. Greswold. Had I
known your address, I think I should have taken the initiative,
and written to you. Believe me, I respect your motive for the act
which has, I fear, cast a blight upon a good man’s life; and I will
venture to say no more than that the motive should be a very strong
one which forces you to persevere in a course that has wrecked your
husband’s happiness, and desolated one of the most delightful and most
thoroughly Christian homes I had ever the privilege of entering. I
look back and recall what Enderby Manor was, and I think what it is
now, and I can hardly compare those two pictures without tears.
“You ask me to tell you frankly all I can tell about your husband’s
mode of life, his health and spirits. All I can tell is summed up
in four words: his heart is broken. In my deep concern about his
desolate position, in my heartfelt regard for him, I have ventured
to force my society upon him sometimes when I could not doubt it was
unwelcome. He received me with all his old kindness of manner; but
I am sympathetic enough to know when a man only endures my company,
and I know that his feeling was at best endurance. But I believe
that he trusts me, and that he was less upon his guard with me than
he is with other acquaintances. I have seen him put on an appearance
of cheerfulness with other people. I have heard him talk to other
people as if life had in nowise lost its interest for him. With me
he dropped the mask. I saw him brooding by his hearth, as he broods
when he is alone. I heard his involuntary sighs. I saw the image of a
shipwrecked existence. Indeed, Mrs. Greswold, there is nothing else
that I can tell you if you would have me truthful. You have broken
his heart. You have sacrificed your love to a principle, you say. You
should be very sure of your principle. You ask me as to his habits
and occupations. I believe they are about as monotonous as those of
a galley-slave. He walks a great deal—in all weathers and at all
hours—but rarely beyond his own land. I don’t think he often rides;
and he has not hunted once during the season. He did a little shooting
in October and November, quite alone. He has had no staying visitor
within his doors since you left him.
“I have reason to know that he goes to the churchyard every evening
at dusk, and spends some time beside your daughter’s grave. I have
seen him there several times when it was nearly dark, and he had no
apprehension of being observed. You know how rarely any one enters our
quiet little burial-ground, and how complete a solitude it is at that
twilight hour. I am about the only passer-by, and even I do not pass
within sight of the old yew-tree above your darling’s resting-place,
unless I go a little out of my way between the vestry-door and the
lych-gate. I have often gone out of my way to note that lonely figure
by the grave. Be assured, dear Mrs. Greswold, that in sending you this
gloomy picture of a widowed life I have had no wish to distress you. I
have exaggerated nothing. I wish you to know the truth; and if it lies
within your power—without going against your conscience—to undo that
which you have done, I entreat you to do so without delay. There may
not be much time to be lost.—Believe me, devotedly and gratefully your
friend,
FREDERICK ROLLINSON.”
Mildred shed bitter tears over the curate’s letter. How different the
picture it offered from that afforded by George Greswold’s own letters,
in which he had written cheerily of the shooting, the dogs and horses,
the changes in the seasons, and the events of the outer world! That
frank easy tone had been part of his armour of pride. He would not
abase himself by the admission of his misery. He had guessed, no doubt,
that his wife would read those letters, and he would not have her know
the extent of the ruin she had wrought.
She thought of him in his solitude, pictured him beside their child’s
grave, and the longing to look upon him once more—unseen by him, if it
could be so—became irresistible. She determined to see with her own
eyes if he were as unhappy as Mr. Rollinson supposed. She, who knew him
so well, would be better able to judge by his manner and bearing—better
able to divine the inner workings of his heart and mind. It had been a
habit of her life to read his face, to guess his thoughts before they
found expression in words. He had never been able to keep a secret from
her, except that one long-hidden story of the past; and even there she
had known that there was something. She had seen the shadow of that
abiding remorse.
“I am going to leave you for two days, aunt,” she said rather abruptly,
on the morning after she received Rollinson’s letter. “I want to look
at Lola’s grave. I shall go from here to Enderby as fast as the train
will take me; spend an hour in the churchyard; go on to Salisbury for
the night; and come back to you to-morrow afternoon.”
“You mean that you are going back to your husband?”
“No, no. I may see him, perhaps, by accident. I shall not enter the
Manor House. I am going to the churchyard—nowhere else.”
“You would be wiser if you went straight home. Remember, years hence,
when I am dead and gone, that I told you as much. You must do as you
like—stay at an inn at Salisbury, while your own beautiful home is
empty, or anything else that is foolish and wrong-headed. You had
better let Franz go with you.”
“Thanks, aunt; I would not take him away on any account. I can get on
quite well by myself.”
She left Brighton at midday, lost a good deal of time at the two
junctions, and drove to within a few hundred yards of Enderby Church
just as the bright May day was melting into evening. There was a
path across some meadows at the back of the village that led to the
churchyard. She stopped the fly by the meadow-gate, and told the man
to drive round to Mr. Rollinson’s lodgings, and wait for her there;
and then she walked slowly along the narrow footpath, between the long
grass, golden with buttercups in the golden evening.
It was a lovely evening. There was a little wood of oaks and chestnuts
on her left hand as she approached the churchyard, and the shrubberies
of Enderby Manor were on her right. The trees she knew so well—her own
trees—the tall mountain-ash and the clump of beeches, rose above the
lower level of lilacs and laburnums, acacia and rose maple. There was
a nightingale singing in the thick foliage yonder—there was always a
nightingale at this season somewhere in the shrubbery. She had lingered
many a time with her husband to listen to that unmistakable melody.
The dark foliage of the churchyard made an inky blot midst all that
vernal greenery. Those immemorial yews, which knew no change with the
changing years, spread their broad shadows over the lowly graves, and
made night in God’s acre while it was yet day in the world outside.
Mildred went into the churchyard as if into the realm of death. The
shadows closed round her on every side, and the change from light to
gloom chilled her as she walked slowly towards the place where her
child was lying.
Yes, he was there, just as the curate had told her. He stood leaning
against the long horizontal branch of the old yew, looking down at the
marble which bore his daughter’s name. He was very pale, and his sunken
eyes and hollow cheeks told of failing health. He stood motionless, in
a gloomy reverie. His wife watched him from a little way off; she stood
motionless as himself—stood and watched him till the beating of her
heart sounded so loud in her own ears that she thought he too must hear
that passionate throbbing.
She had thought when she set out on her journey that it would be
sufficient for her just to see him, and that having seen him she would
go away and leave him without his ever knowing that she had looked upon
him. But now the time had come it was not enough. The impulse to draw
nearer and to speak to him was too strong to be denied: she went with
tottering footsteps to the side of the grave, and called him by his
name:
“George! George!” holding out her hands to him piteously.
CHAPTER VIII.
“HOW SHOULD I GREET THEE?”
The marble countenance scarcely changed as he looked up at her. He took
no notice of the outstretched hands.
“What brings you here, Mildred?” he asked coldly.
“I heard that you were ill; I wanted to see for myself,” she faltered.
“I am not ill, and I have not been ill. You were misinformed.”
“I was told you were unhappy.”
“Did you require to be told that? You did not expect to hear that I
was particularly happy, I suppose? At my age men have forgotten how to
forget.”
“It would be such a relief to my mind if you could find new
occupations, new interests, as I hope to do by and by—a wider horizon.
You are so clever. You have so many gifts, and it is a pity to bury
them all here.”
“My heart is buried here,” he answered, looking down at the grave.
“Your heart, yes; but you might find work for your mind—a noble career
before you—in politics, in philanthropy.”
“I am not ambitious, and I am too old to adapt myself to a new life.
I prefer to live as I am living. Enderby is my hermitage. It suits me
well enough.”
There was a silence after this—a silence of despair. Mildred knelt on
the dewy grass, and bent herself over the marble cross, and kissed the
cold stone. She could reach no nearer than that marble to the child she
loved. Her lips lingered there. Her heart ached with a dull pain, and
she felt the utter hopelessness of her life more keenly than she had
felt it yet. If she could but die there, at his feet, and make an end!
She rose after some minutes. Her husband’s attitude was unchanged; but
he looked at her now, for the first time, with a direct and earnest
gaze.
“What took you to Nice?” he asked.
“I wanted to know—all about my unhappy sister.”
“And you are satisfied—you know all; and you think as some of my
neighbours thought of me. You believe that I killed my wife.”
“George, can you think so meanly of me—your wife of fourteen years?”
“You spare me, then, so far, in spite of circumstantial evidence. You
do not think of me as a murderer?”
“I have never for a moment doubted your goodness to that unhappy girl,”
she answered, with a stifled sob. “I am sorry for her with all my
heart; but I cannot blame you.”
“There you are wrong. I was to blame. You know that I do not easily
lose my temper—to a woman, least of all; but that day I lost control
over myself—lost patience with her just when she was in greatest
need of my forbearance. She was nervous and hysterical. I forgot her
weakness. I spoke to her cruelly—lashed and goaded by her causeless
jealousies—so persistent, so irritating—like the continual dropping
of water. How I have suffered for that moment of anger God alone can
know. If remorse can be expiation, I have expiated that unpremeditated
sin!”
“Yes, yes, I know how you have suffered. Your dreams have told me.”
“Ah, those dreams! You can never imagine the agony of them. To fancy
her walking by my side, bright and happy, as she so seldom was upon
this earth, and to tell myself that I had never been unkind to her,
that her suicide was a dream and a delusion, and then to feel the dull
cold reality creep back into my brain, and to know that I was guilty
of her death. Yes, I have held myself guilty. I have never paltered
with my conscience. Had I been patient to the end, she might have
lived to be the happy mother of my child. Her whole life might have
been changed. I never loved her, Mildred. Fate and her own impulsive
nature flung her into my arms; but I accepted the charge; I made myself
responsible to God and my own conscience for her well-being.”
Mildred’s only answer was a sob. She stretched out her hand, and laid
it falteringly upon the hand that hung loose across the branch of the
yew, as if in token of trustfulness.
“Did you find out anything more in your retrospective gropings—at
Nice?” he asked, with a touch of bitterness.
She was silent.
“Did you hear that I was out of my mind after my wife’s death?”
“Yes.”
“Did that shock you? Did it horrify you to know you had lived fourteen
years with a _ci-devant_ lunatic?”
“George, how can you say such things! I could perfectly understand
how your mind was affected by that dreadful event—how the strongest
brain might be unhinged by such a sorrow. I can sympathise with you,
and understand you in the past as I can in the present. How can you
forget that I am your wife, a part of yourself, able to read all your
thoughts?”
“I cannot forget that you have been my wife; but your sympathy and your
affection seem very far off now—as remote almost as that tragedy which
darkened my youth. It is all past and done with—the sorrow and pain,
the hope and gladness. I have done with everything—except my regret for
my child.”
“Can you believe that I feel the parting less than you, George?” she
asked piteously.
“I don’t know. The parting is your work. You have the satisfaction
of self-sacrifice—the pride which women who go to church twice a day
have in renouncing earthly happiness. They school themselves first in
trifles—giving up this and that—theatres, fiction, cheerful society—and
then their ambition widens. These petty sacrifices are not enough,
and they renounce a husband and a home. If the husband cannot see the
necessity, and cannot kiss the rod, so much the worse for him. His
wife has the perverted pride of an Indian widow who flings her young
life upon the funeral pile, jubilant at the thought of her own exalted
virtue.”
“Would you not sacrifice your happiness to your conscience, George, if
conscience spoke plainly?” Mildred asked reproachfully.
“I don’t know. Human love might be too strong for conscience. God
knows I would not have sacrificed you to a scruple—to a law made by
man. God’s laws are different. There is no doubt about them.”
The evening was darkening. The nightingale burst out suddenly into loud
melody, more joyous than her reputation. Mildred could see the lights
in the house that had been her home. The lamp-light in the drawing-room
shone across the intervening space of lawn and shrubberies; the broad
window shone vividly at the end of a vista, like a star. O lovely room,
O happy life; so far off, so impossible for evermore!
“Good-night and good-bye,” Mildred sighed, holding out her hand.
“Good-bye,” he answered, taking the small cold hand, only to let it
drop again.
He made no inquiry as to how she had come there, or whither she was
going. She had appeared to him suddenly as a spirit in the soft
eventide, and he let her go from him unquestioned, as if she had been
a spirit. She felt the coldness of her dismissal, and yet felt that it
could be no otherwise. She must be all to him or nothing. After love
so perfect as theirs had been there could be no middle course.
She went across the meadow by the way she had come, and through the
village street, where all the doors were closed at this hour, and
paraffin-lamps glowed brightly in parlour-windows. Dear little humble
street, how her heart yearned over it as she went silently by like a
ghost, closely veiled, a slender figure dressed in black! She had been
very fond of her villagers, had entered into their lives and been a
brightening influence for most of them, she and her child. Lola had
been familiar with every creature in the place, from the humpbacked
cobbler at the corner to the gray-haired postmaster in the white
half-timbered cottage yonder, where the letter-boxes were approached
by a narrow path across a neat little garden. Lola had entered into
all their lives, and had been glad and sorry with them with a power of
sympathy which was the only precocious element in her nature. She had
been a child in all things except charity; there she had been a woman.
There was a train for Salisbury in half-an-hour, and there was a later
train at ten o’clock. Mildred had intended to travel at the earlier
hour, but she felt an irresistible inclination to linger in the beloved
place where her happiness was buried. She wanted to see some one who
would talk to her of her husband, and she knew that the curate could
be trusted; so she determined upon waiting for the later train, in the
event of her finding Mr. Rollinson at home.
The paraffin-lamp in the parlour over the carpenter’s shop was
brighter than any other in the village, and Mr. Rollinson’s shadow was
reflected on the blind, with the usual tendency towards caricature.
The carpenter’s wife, who opened the door, was an old friend of Mrs.
Greswold’s, and was not importunate in her expressions of surprise and
pleasure.
“Please do not mention to any one that I have been at Enderby, Mrs.
Mason,” Mildred said quietly. “I am only here for an hour or two on
my way to Salisbury. I should like to see Mr. Rollinson, if he is
disengaged.”
“Of course he is, ma’am, for you. He’ll be overjoyed to see you, I’m
sure.”
Mrs. Mason bustled up the steep little staircase, followed closely by
Mildred. She flung open the door with a flourish, and discovered Mr.
Rollinson enjoying a tea-dinner, with the _Times_ propped up between
his plate and the teapot.
He started to his feet at sight of his visitor like a man distraught,
darted forward and shook hands with Mildred, then glanced despairingly
at the table. For such a guest he would have liked to have had turtle
and ortolans; but a tea-dinner, a vulgar tea-dinner—a dish of pig’s
trotters, a couple of new-laid eggs, and a pile of buttered toast! He
had thought it a luxurious meal when he sat down to it, five minutes
ago, very sharp set.
“My dear Mrs. Greswold, I am enchanted. You have been travelling? Yes.
If—if you would share my humble collation—but you are going to dine at
the Manor, no doubt.”
“No; I am not going to the Manor. I should be very glad of a cup of
tea, if I may have one with you.”
“Mrs. Mason, a fresh teapot, directly, if you please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And could you not get some dinner for Mrs. Greswold? A sole and a
chicken, a little asparagus. I saw a bundle in the village the day
before yesterday,” suggested the curate feebly.
“On no account. I could not eat any dinner. I will have an egg and
a little toast, if you please,” said Mildred, seeing the curate’s
distressed look, and not wishing to reject his hospitality.
“Will you really, now? Mrs. Mason’s eggs are excellent; and she
makes toast better than any one else in the world, I think,” replied
Rollinson, flinging his napkin artfully over the trotters, and with a
side glance at Mrs. Mason which implored their removal.
That admirable woman grasped the situation. She whisked off the dish,
and the curate’s plate with its litter of bones and mustard. She swept
away crumbs, tidied the tea-tray, brought a vase of spring flowers from
a cheffonier to adorn the table, lighted a pair of wax candles on the
mantelpiece, and gave a touch of elegance to the humble sitting-room,
while Mildred was taking off her mantle and bonnet, and sinking wearily
into Mr. Rollinson’s easy-chair by the hearth, where a basket of
fir-cones replaced the winter fire.
She felt glad to be with this old familiar friend—glad to breathe the
very air of Enderby after her six months’ exile.
“Your letter frightened me,” she said, when she was alone with the
curate. “I came to look at my husband. I could not help coming.”
“Ah, dear Mrs. Greswold, if you could only come back for good—nothing
else is of any use. Have you seen him?”
“Yes,” she sighed.
“And you find him sadly changed?”
“Sadly changed. I wish you would try to rouse him—to interest him in
farming—building—politics—anything. He is so clever; he ought to have
so many resources.”
“For his mind, perhaps; but not for his heart. You are doing all you
can to break that.”
Mildred turned her head aside with a weary movement, as of a creature
at bay.
“Don’t talk about it. You cannot understand. You look up to Clement
Cancellor, I think. You would respect his opinion.”
“Yes; he is a good man.”
“He is—and he approves the course I have taken. He is my confidant and
my counsellor.”
“You could have no better adviser in a case of conscience—yet I can but
regret my friend’s ruined life, all the same. But I will say no more,
Mrs. Greswold. I will respect your reserve.”
Mrs. Mason came bustling in with a tea-tray, on which her family
teapot—the silver teapot that had been handed down from generation to
generation since the days of King George the Third—and her very best
pink and gold china sparkled and glittered in the lamp-light. The toast
and eggs might have tempted an anchorite, and Mildred had eaten nothing
since her nine-o’clock breakfast. The strong tea revived her like
good old wine, and she sat resting and listening with interest to Mr.
Rollinson’s account of his parishioners, and the village chronicle of
the last six months. How sweet it was to hear the old familiar names,
to be in the old place, if only for a brief hour!
“I wonder if they miss me?” she speculated. “They never seemed quite
the same—after—after the fever.”
“Ah, but they know your value now. They have missed you sadly, and they
have missed your husband’s old friendly interest in their affairs. He
has given me _carte blanche_, and there has been no one neglected,
nothing left undone; but they miss the old personal relations, the
friendship of past days. You must not think that the poor care only for
creature comforts and substantial benefits.”
“I have never thought so. And now tell me all you can about my husband.
Does he receive no one?”
“No one. People used to call upon him for a month or two after you
left, but he never returned their visits, he declined all invitations,
and he made his friends understand pretty clearly that he had done
with the outside world. He rarely comes to the eleven-o’clock service
on Sundays, but he comes to the early services, and I believe he walks
into Romsey sometimes for the evening service. He has not hardened his
heart against his God.”
“Do you see him often?”
“About once a week. I take him my report of the sick and poor. I
believe he is as much interested in that as he can be in anything;
but I always feel that my society is a burden to him, in spite of his
courteousness. I borrow a book from him sometimes, so as to have an
excuse for spending a few minutes with him when I return it.”
“You are a good man, Mr. Rollinson, a true friend,” said Mildred, in a
low voice.
“Would to God that my friendship could do more for him! Unhappily it
can do so little.”
The fly came back for Mildred at nine o’clock. She had telegraphed from
Brighton to the inn at Salisbury where she was to spend the night,
and her room was ready for her when she arrived there at half-past
ten: a spacious bedroom with a four-post bed, in which she lay broad
awake all night, living over and over again that scene beside the
grave, and seeing her husband’s gloomy face, and its mute reproach.
She knew that she had done wrong in breaking in upon his solitude, she
who renounced the tie that bound her to him; and yet there had been
something gained. He knew now that under no stress of evidence could
she ever believe him guilty of his wife’s death. He knew that his last
and saddest secret was revealed to her, and that she was loyal to him
still—loyal although divided.
She went to the morning service at the Cathedral. She lingered about
the grave old Close, looking dreamily in at the gardens which had such
an air of old-world peace. She was reluctant to leave Salisbury. It was
near all that she had loved and lost. The place had the familiar air of
the district in which she had lived so long—different in somewise from
all other places, or seeming different by fond association.
She telegraphed to her aunt that she might be late in returning, and
lingered on till three o’clock in the afternoon, and then took the
train, which dawdled at three or four stations before it came to
Bishopstoke—the familiar junction where the station-master and the
superintendents knew her, and asked after her husband’s health, giving
her a pain at her heart with each inquiry. She would have been glad to
pass to the Portsmouth train unrecognised, but it was not to be.
“You have been in the South all the winter, I hear, ma’am. I hope it
was not on account of your health?”
“Yes,” she faltered, “partly on that account,” as she hurried on to the
carriage which the station-master opened for her with his own hand.
His face was among her home faces. She had travelled up and down the
line very often in the good days that were gone—with her husband and
Lola, and their comfort had been cared for almost as if they had been
royal personages.
It was night when she reached Brighton, and Franz was on the platform
waiting for her, and the irreproachable brougham was drawn up close
by, the brown horse snorting, and with eyes of fire, not brooking the
vicinity of the engine, though too grand a creature to know fear.
She found Miss Fausset in low spirits.
“I have missed you terribly,” she said. “I am a poor creature. I used
to think myself independent of sympathy or companionship—but that is
all over now. When I am alone for two days at a stretch I feel like a
child in the dark.”
“You have lived too long in this house, aunt, I think,” Mildred
answered gently. “Forgive me if I say that it is a dull house.”
“A dull house? Nonsense, Mildred! It is one of the best houses in
Brighton.”
“Yes, yes, aunt, but it is dull, all the same. The sun does not shine
into it; the colouring of the furniture is gray and cold—”
“I hate gaudy colours.”
“Yes, but there are beautiful colours that are not gaudy—beautiful
things that warm and gladden one. The next room,” glancing back at the
front drawing-room and its single lamp, “is full of ghosts. Those long
white curtains, those faint gray walls, are enough to kill you.”
“I am not so fanciful as that.”
“Ah, but you are fanciful, perhaps without knowing it. The influence
of this dull gray house may have crept into your veins and depressed
you unawares. Will you go to the Italian Lakes with me next September,
aunt? Or, better, will you go to the West of England with me next
week—to the north coast of Cornwall, which will be lovely at this
season? I am sure you want change. This monotonous life is killing you.”
“No, no, Mildred. There is nothing amiss with my life. It suits me well
enough, and I am able to do good.”
“Your lieutenants could carry on all that while you were away.”
“No; I like to be here; I like to organise, to arrange. I can feel that
my life is not useless, that my talent is placed at interest.”
“It could all go on, aunt; it could indeed. The change to new scenes
would revive you.”
“No. I am satisfied where I am. I am among people whom I like, and who
like and respect me.”
She dwelt upon the last words with unction, as if there were tangible
comfort in them.
Mildred sighed and was silent. She had felt it her duty to try and
rouse her aunt from the dull apathy into which she seemed gradually
sinking, and she thought that the only chance of revival was to remove
her from the monotony of her present existence.
Later on in the evening the fire had been lighted in the inner
drawing-room, Miss Fausset feeling chilly, in spite of the approach of
summer, and aunt and niece drew near the hearth for cheerfulness and
comfort. The low reading-lamp spread its light only over Miss Fausset’s
book-table and the circle in which it stood. The faces of both women
were in shadow, and the lofty room with its walls of books was full of
shadows.
“You talk so despondently of life sometimes, aunt, as if it had been
all disappointment,” said Mildred, after a long silence, in which they
had both sat watching the fire, each absorbed by her own thoughts;
“yet your girlhood must have been bright. I have heard my dear father
say how indulgent his father was, how he gave way to his children in
everything.”
“Yes, he was very indulgent; too indulgent perhaps. I had my own way
in everything; only—one’s own way does not always lead to happiness.
Mine did not. I might have been a happier woman if my father had been a
tyrant.”
“You would have married, perhaps, in that case, to escape from an
unhappy home. I wish you would tell me more about your girlish years,
aunt. You must have had many admirers when you were young, and amongst
them all there must have been some one for whom you cared—just a
little. Would it hurt you to talk to me about that old time?”
“Yes, Mildred. There are some women who can talk about such
things—women who can prose for hours to their granddaughters or their
nieces—simpering over the silliness of the past—boasting of conquests
which nobody believes in; for it is very difficult to realise the fact
that an old woman was ever young and lovely. I am not of that temper,
Mildred. The memory of my girlhood is hateful to me.”
“Ah, then there was some sad story—some unhappy attachment. I was sure
it must have been so,” said Mildred, in a low voice. “But tell me of
that happier time before you went into society—the time when you were
in Italy with your governess, studying at the Conservatoire at Milan. I
thought of you so much when I was at Milan the other day.”
“I have nothing to tell about that time. I was a foreigner in a strange
city, with an elderly woman who was paid to take care of me, and whose
chief occupation was to take care of herself: a solicitor’s widow,
whose health required that she should winter in the South, and who
contrived to make my father pay handsomely for her benefit.”
“And you were not happy at Milan?”
“Happy! no. I got on with my musical education—that was all I cared
for.”
“Had you no friends—no introductions to nice people?”
“No. My chaperon made my father believe that she knew all the best
families in Milan, but her circle resolved itself into a few third-rate
musical people who gave shabby little evening-parties. You bore me to
death, Mildred, when you force me to talk of that time, and of that
woman, whom I hated.”
“Forgive me, aunt, I will ask no more questions,” said Mildred, with a
sigh.
She had been trying to get nearer to her kinswoman, to familiarise
herself with that dim past when this fading life was fresh and full
of hope. It seemed to her as if there was a dead wall between her
and Miss Fausset—a barrier of reserve which should not exist between
those who were so near in blood. She had made up her mind to stay with
her aunt to the end, to do all that duty and affection could suggest,
and it troubled her that they should still be strangers. After this
severe repulse she could make no further attempt. There was evidently
no softening influence in the memory of the past. Miss Fausset’s
character, as revealed by that which she concealed rather than by that
which she told, was not beautiful. Mildred could but think that she had
been a proud, cold-hearted young woman, valuing herself too highly to
inspire love or sympathy in others; electing to be alone and unloved.
After this, time went by in a dull monotony. The same people came to
see Miss Fausset day after day, and she absorbed the same flatteries,
accepted the same adulation, always with an air of deepest humility.
She organised her charities, she listened to every detail about the
circumstances, and even the mental condition and spiritual views of
her poor. Mildred discovered before long that there was a leaven of
hardness in her benevolence. She could not tolerate sin, she weighed
every life in the same balance, she expected exceptional purity amidst
foulest surroundings. She was liberal of her worldly goods; but her
mind was as narrow as if she had lived in a remote village a hundred
years ago. Mildred found herself continually pleading for wrong-doers.
The only event or excitement which the bright June days brought with
them was the arrival of Pamela Ransome, who was escorted to Brighton by
Lady Lochinvar herself, and who had been engaged for the space of three
weeks to Malcolm Stuart, with everybody’s consent and approval.
“I wrote to Uncle George the very day I was engaged, aunt, as well as
to you; and he answered my letter in the sweetest way, and he is going
to give me a grand piano,” said Pamela, all in a breath.
Lady Lochinvar explained that, much as she detested London, she
had felt it her solemn duty to establish herself there during her
nephew’s engagement, in order that she might become acquainted with
Pamela’s people, and assist her dear boy in all his arrangements for
the future. When a young man marries a nice girl with an estate
worth fifteen hundred a year—allowing for the poor return made by
land nowadays—everything ought to go upon velvet. Lady Lochinvar was
prepared to make sacrifices, or, in other words, to contribute a
handsome portion of that fortune which she intended to bequeath to her
nephew. She could afford to be generous, having a surplus far beyond
her possible needs, and she was very fond of Malcolm Stuart, who had
been to her as a son.
“I was quite alone in the world when my husband died,” she told
Mildred. “My father and my own people were all gone, and I should
have been a wretched creature without Malcolm. He was the only son of
Lochinvar’s favourite sister, who went off in a decline when he was
eight years old, and he had been brought up at the Castle. So it is
natural, you see, that I should be fond of him and interested in his
welfare.”
Pamela kissed her, by way of commentary.
“I think you are quite the dearest thing in the world,” she said,
“except Aunt Mildred.”
It may be seen from this remark that the elder and younger lady
were now on very easy terms. Mildred had stayed in Paris with Lady
Lochinvar, and a considerable part of her trousseau, the outward and
visible part, had been chosen in the _ateliers_ of fashionable Parisian
dressmakers and man milliners. The more humdrum portion of the bride’s
raiment was to be obtained at Brighton, where Pamela was to spend a
week or two with her aunt before she went to London to stay with the
Mountfords, who had taken a house in Grosvenor Gardens, from which
Pamela was to be married.
“And where do you think we are to be married, aunt?” exclaimed Pamela
excitedly.
“At St. George’s?”
“Nothing so humdrum. We are going to be married in the Abbey—in
Westminster Abbey—the burial-place of heroes and poets. I happened
to say one day when Malcolm and I were almost strangers—it was at
Rumpelmeyer’s, sitting outside in the sun, eating ices—that I had
never seen a wedding in the Abbey, and that I should love to see one;
and Malcolm said we must try and manage it some day—meaning anybody’s
wedding, of course, though he pretends now that he always meant to
marry me there himself.”
“Presumptious on his part,” said Mildred, smiling.
“O, young men are horribly presumptious; they know they are in a
minority—there is so little competition—and a plain young man, too,
like Malcolm. But I suppose he knows he is nice,” added Pamela
conclusively.
“Don’t you think it will be lovely for me to be married in the Abbey?”
she asked presently.
“I think, dear, in your case I would rather have been married from my
own house, and in a village church.”
“What, in that poky little church at Mapledown? I believe it is one
of the oldest in England, and it is certainly one of the ugliest. Sir
Henry Mountford suggested making a family business of it; but Rosalind
and I were both in favour of the Abbey. We shall get much better
notices in the society papers,” added Pamela, with a business-like air,
as if she had been talking about the production of a new play.
“Well, dear, as I hope you are only to be married once in your life,
you have a right to choose your church.”
Pamela was bitterly disappointed presently when her aunt refused to be
present at her wedding.
“I will spend an hour with you on your wedding morning, and see you in
your wedding-gown, if you like, Pamela; but I cannot go among a crowd
of gay people, or share in any festivity. I have done with all those
things, dear, for ever and ever.”
Pamela’s candid eyes filled with tears. She felt all the more sorry for
her aunt, because her own cup of happiness was overflowing. She looked
round the silver-gray drawing-room, and her eyes fixed themselves on
the piano which _he_ had played, so often, so often, in the tender
twilight, in the shadowy evening when that larger room was left almost
without any light save that which came through the undraped archway
yonder. But Castellani was no longer a person to be thought of in
italics. From the moment Pamela’s eyes had opened to the excellence of
Mr. Stuart’s manly and straightforward character, they had also become
aware of the Italian’s deficiencies. She had realised the fact that he
was a charlatan; and now she looked wonderingly at the piano, at a loss
to understand the intensity of bygone emotions, and inclined to excuse
herself upon the ground of youthful foolishness.
“What a silly romantic wretch I must have been!” she thought; “a
regular Rosa Matilda! As if the happiness of life depended upon one’s
husband having an ear for music!”
Mildred was by no means unsympathetic about the trousseau, although
she herself had done with all interest in fashion and finery. She
drove about to the pretty Brighton shops with Pamela, and exercised
a restraining influence upon that young lady’s taste, which inclined
to the florid. She sympathised with the young lady’s anxiety about
her wedding-gown, which was to be made by a certain Mr. Smithson, a
_faiseur_ who held potent sway over the ladies of fashionable London,
and who gave himself more airs than a Prime Minister. Mr. Smithson
had consented to make Miss Ransome a wedding-gown—despite her social
insignificance and the pressure of the season—provided that he were
not worried about the affair.
“If I have too many people calling upon me, or am pestered with
letters, I shall throw the thing up,” he told Lady Mountford one
morning, when she took him some fine old rose-point for the petticoat.
“Yes, this lace is pretty good. I suppose you got it in Venice. I have
seen Miss Ransome, and I know what kind of gown she can wear. It will
be sent home the day before the wedding.”
With this assurance, haughtily given, Lady Mountford and her sister had
to be contented.
“If I were your sister I would let a woman in Tottenham Court Road make
my gowns rather than I would stand such treatment,” said Sir Henry;
at which his wife shrugged her shoulders and told him he knew nothing
about it.
“The cut is everything,” she said. “It is worth putting up with
Smithson’s insolence to know that one is the best-dressed woman in the
room.”
“But if Smithson dresses all the other women—”
“He doesn’t. There are very few who have the courage to go to him. His
manners are so humiliating—he as good as told me I had a hump—and his
prices are enormous.”
“And yet you call me extravagant for giving seventy pounds for a barb!”
cried Sir Henry; “a bird that might bring me a pot of money in prizes.”
* * * * *
The grand question of trousseau and wedding-gown being settled, there
remained only a point of minor importance—the honeymoon. Pamela was in
favour of that silly season being spent in some rustic spot, far from
the madding crowd, and Pamela’s lover was of her opinion in everything.
“We have both seen the best part of the Continent,” said Pamela, taking
tea in Mildred’s upstairs sitting-room, which had assumed a brighter
and more home-like aspect in her occupation than any other room in
Miss Fausset’s house; “we don’t want to rush off to Switzerland or the
Pyrenees; we want just to enjoy each other’s society and to make our
plans for the future. Besides, travelling is so hideously unbecoming.
I have seen brides with dusty hats and smuts on their faces who would
have been miserable if they had only known what objects they were.”
“I think you and Mr. Stuart are very wise in your choice, dear,”
answered Mildred. “England in July is delicious. Have you decided where
to go?”
“No, we can’t make up our minds. We want to find a place that is
exquisitely pretty—yet not too far from London, so that we may run up
to town occasionally and see about our furnishing. Sir Henry offered
us Rainham, but as it is both ugly and inconvenient I unhesitatingly
refused. I don’t want to spend my honeymoon in a place pervaded by
prize pigeons.”
“What do you think of the neighbourhood of the Thames, Pamela?” asked
Mildred thoughtfully. “Are you fond of boating?”
“Fond! I adore it. I could live all my life upon the river.”
“Really! I have been thinking that if you and Mr. Stuart would like to
spend your honeymoon at The Hook it is just the kind of place to suit
you. The house is bright and pretty, and the gardens are exquisite.”
Pamela’s face kindled with pleasure.
“But, dear aunt, you would never think—” she began.
“The place is at your service, my dear girl. It will be a pleasure
for me to prepare everything for you. I cannot tell you how dearly I
love that house, or how full of memories it is for me. The lease of my
father’s house in Parchment Street was sold after his death, and I only
kept a few special things out of the furniture, but at The Hook nothing
has been altered since I was a child.”
Pamela accepted the offer with rapture, and wrote an eight-page letter
to her lover upon the subject, although he was coming to Brighton next
day, and was to dine in Lewes Crescent. Mildred was pleased at being
able to give so much pleasure to her husband’s niece. It may be also
that she snatched at an excuse for revisiting a spot she fondly loved.
She offered to take Pamela with her, to explore the house and gardens,
and discuss any small arrangements for the bride’s comfort, but
against this Miss Ransome protested.
“I want everything to be new to us,” she said, “all untrodden ground,
a delicious surprise. I am sure the place is lovely; and I want to
know no more about it than I know of fairyland. I haven’t the faintest
notion what a Hook can be in connection with the Thames. It may be a
mountain or a glacier, for anything I know to the contrary; but I am
assured it is delightful. Please let me know nothing more, dearest
aunt, till I go there with Malcolm. It is adorable of you to hit
upon such a splendid idea. And it will look very well in the society
papers,” added Pamela, waxing business-like. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm
Stuart!’ (O, how queer that sounds!) ‘are to spend their honeymoon
at The Hook, the riverside residence of the bride’s aunt.’ I wonder
whether they will say ‘the well-known residence’?” mused Pamela.
Mildred went up to town with Miss Ransome and her betrothed at the
end of the young lady’s visit. Miss Fausset had been coldly gracious,
after her manner, had allowed Mr. Stuart to come to her house whenever
he pleased, and had given up the rarely-used front drawing-room to
the lovers, who sat and whispered and tittered over their own little
witticisms, by the distant piano, and behaved altogether like those
proverbial children of whom we are told in our childhood, who are
seen but not heard. Mildred lunched in Grosvenor Gardens, and went to
Chertsey by an afternoon train. The housekeeper who had once ruled over
both Mr. Fausset’s houses, subject to interference from Bell, was now
caretaker at The Hook, with a housemaid under her. She was an elderly
woman, but considerably Bell’s junior, and she was an admirable cook
and manager. A telegram two days before had told her to expect her
mistress, and the house was in perfect order when Mrs. Greswold arrived
in the summer twilight. All things had been made to look as if the
place were in family occupation, though no one but the two servants had
been living there since Mr. Fausset’s death. The familiar aspect of the
rooms smote Mildred with a sudden unexpected pain. There were the old
lamps burning on the tables, the well-remembered vases—her mother’s
choice, and always artistic in form and colour—filled with the old June
flowers from garden and hothouse. Her father’s chair stood in its old
place in the bay-window in front of the table at which he used to write
his letters sometimes, looking out at the river between whiles. Mrs.
Dawson had put a lamp in his study, a small room opening out of the
drawing-room, and with windows on two sides, and both looking towards
the river, which he had loved so well. The windows were open in the
twilight, and the rose-garden was like a sea of bloom.
In her father’s room nothing was altered. As it had been in the last
days he had lived there, so it was now.
“I haven’t moved so much as a penholder, ma’am,” said Dawson tearfully.
CHAPTER IX.
LITERA SCRIPTA MANET.
The house and grounds were in such perfect order that there was very
little to be done in the way of preparation for the honeymoon visitors.
Even the pianos had been periodically tuned, and the clocks had been
regularly wound. Two or three servants would have to be engaged for the
period, and that was all; and even this want Mrs. Dawson proposed to
supply without going off the premises.
The housemaid had a sister, who was an accomplished parlourmaid
and carver; the under-gardener’s eldest daughter was pining for a
preliminary canter in the kitchen, and the gardener’s wife was a
retired cook, and would be delighted to take all the rougher part of
the cooking, while Mrs. Dawson devoted her art to those pretty tiny
kickshaws in which she excelled. There were peaches ripening in the
peach-house, and the apricots were going to be a show. There was wine
in the cellar that would have satisfied an alderman on his honeymoon.
Mildred’s business at The Hook might have been completed in a day, yet
she lingered there for a week, and still lingered on, loving the place
with a love which was mingled with pain, yet happier there than she
could have been anywhere else in the world, she thought.
The chief gardener rowed her about the river, never going very far from
home, but meandering about the summer stream, by flowery meadows, and
reedy eyots, and sometimes diverging into a tributary stream, where the
shallow water seemed only an excuse for wild flowers. He had rowed her
up and down those same streams when she was a child with streaming hair
and he was the under-gardener. He had rowed her about in that brief
summer season when Fay was her companion.
She revisited all those spots in which she had wandered with her lover.
She would land here or there along the island, and as she remembered
each particular object in the landscape, her feet seemed to grow
light again, with the lightness of joyous youth, as they touched the
familiar shore. It was almost as if her youth came back to her.
Thus it was that she lingered from day to day, loth to leave the
beloved place. She wrote frankly to her aunt, saying how much good
the change of air and scene had done her, and promising to return to
Brighton in a few days. She felt that it was her duty to resume her
place beside that fading existence; and yet it was an infinite relief
to her to escape from that dull gray house, and the dull gray life.
She acknowledged to herself that her aunt’s life was a good life, full
of unselfish work and large charity, and yet there was something that
repelled her, even while she admired. It was too much like a life lived
up to a certain model, adjusted line by line to a carefully-studied
plan. There was a lack of spontaneity, a sense of perpetual effort.
The benevolence which had made Enderby village like one family in the
sweet time that was gone had been of a very different character. There
had been the warmth of love and sympathy in every kindness of George
Greswold’s, and there had been infinite pity for wrong-doers. Miss
Fausset’s almsgiving was after the fashion of the Pharisee of old, and
it was upon the amount given that she held herself justified before
God, not upon the manner of giving.
In those quiet days, spent alone in her old home, Mildred had chosen to
occupy Mr. Fausset’s study rather than the large bright drawing-room.
The smaller room was more completely associated with her father. It
was here—seated in the chair before the writing-table, where she was
sitting now—that he had first talked to her of George Greswold, and had
discussed her future life, questioning his motherless girl with more
than a father’s tenderness about the promptings of her own heart. She
loved the room and all that it contained for the sake of the cherished
hands that had touched these things, and the gentle life that had been
lived here. There had been but one error in his life, she thought—his
treatment of Fay.
“He ought not to have sent her away,” she thought; “he saw us happy
together, his two daughters, and he ought not to have divided us, and
sent her away to a loveless life among strangers. If he had only been
frank and straightforward with my mother she might have forgiven all.”
Might, perhaps. Mildred was not sure upon that point; but she felt very
sure that it was her father’s duty to have braved all consequences
rather than to have sent his unacknowledged child into exile. That fact
of not acknowledging her seemed in itself such a tremendous cruelty
that it intensified every lesser wrong.
Mrs. Dawson understood her mistress’s fancy for her father’s room,
and Mildred’s meals were served here, at a Sutherland-table in the
bay-window, from which she could see the boats go by, Mrs. Dawson
having a profound belief in the efficacy of the boats as a cure for low
spirits.
“People sometimes tell me it must be dull at The Hook,” she said; “but,
lor! they don’t know how many boats go by in summer-time. It’s almost
as gay as Bond Street.”
Mildred lived alone with old memories in the flower-scented room, where
the Spanish blinds made a cool and shadowy atmosphere, while the roses
outside were steeped in sunshine. Those few days were just the most
perfect summer days of the year. She felt sorry that they had not been
reserved for Pamela’s honeymoon. Such sunshine was almost wasted on
her, whose heart was so full of sadness.
It was her last afternoon at The Hook, or the afternoon which she meant
to be her last, having made up her mind to go back to Brighton and duty
on the following day, and she had a task before her, a task which she
had delayed from day to day, just as she had delayed her return to her
aunt.
She had to put away those special and particular objects which had
belonged to her father and mother, and had been a part of their lives.
These were too sacred to be left about now that strangers were to
occupy the rooms of the dead. Hitherto no stranger had entered those
rooms since John Fausset’s death, nothing had been removed or altered.
No documents relating to property or business of any kind had been
kept at The Hook. Mr. Fausset’s affairs had all been put in perfect
order after his wife’s death, and there had been no ransacking for
missing title-deeds or papers of any kind. It had been understood that
all papers and letters of importance were either with Mr. Fausset’s
solicitors or at the house in Parchment Street, and thus the household
gods had been undisturbed in the summer retreat by the river.
Mildred had spent the morning in her mother’s rooms, putting away all
those dainty trifles and prettinesses which had gathered round the
frivolous, luxurious life, as shells and bright-coloured weeds gather
among the low rocks on the edge of the sea. She had placed everything
carefully in a large closet in her mother’s dressing-room, covered
with much tissue-paper, secure from dust and moth; and now she began
the same kind of work in her father’s room, the work of removing all
those objects which had been especially his: the old-fashioned silver
inkstand, the well-worn scarlet morocco blotting-book, with his crest
on the cover, and many inkspots on the leather lining inside, his
penholders and penknives, and a little velvet pen-wiper which she had
made for him when she was ten years old, and which he had kept on his
table ever afterwards.
She looked round the room thoughtfully for a place of security for
these treasures. She had spent a good deal of time in rearranging her
father’s books, which careful and conscientious dusting had reduced to
a chaotic condition. Now every volume was in its place, just as he had
kept them in the old days when it had been her delight to examine the
shelves and to carry away a book of her father’s choosing.
The bookcases were by Chippendale, with fretwork cornices and mahogany
panelling. The lower part was devoted to cupboards, which her father
had always kept under lock and key, but which she supposed to contain
only old magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers, part of that vast mass
of literature which is kept with a view to being looked at some day,
and which finally drifts unread to the bourne of all waste paper, and
is ground into pulp again, and rolls over the endless web again, and
comes back upon the world printed with more intellectual food for the
million of skippers and skimmers.
Yes, one of those mahogany panelled cupboards would serve Mildred’s
purpose admirably. She selected a key from one of the bunches in her
key-box, and opened the cupboard nearest the door.
It was packed tight with _Army Lists_, _New Monthly Magazines_,
and _Edinburgh Reviews_—packed so well that there was scarcely an
interstice that would hold a pin. She opened the next cupboard.
_Sporting Magazine_, _Blackwood_, _Ainsworth_, and a pile of pamphlets.
No room there.
She opened the third, and found it much more loosely packed, with odd
newspapers, and old Prayer Books and Bibles: shabby, old-fashioned
books, which had served for the religious exercises of several
generations of Faussets, and had been piously preserved by the owner
of The Hook. There was room here perhaps for the things in the
writing-table, if all these books and papers were rearranged and
closely packed.
Mildred began her work patiently. She was in no hurry to have done with
her task; it brought her nearer to her beloved dead. She worked slowly,
dreamily almost, her thoughts dwelling on the days that were gone.
She took out the Prayer Books and Bibles one by one, looking at a
fly-leaf now and then. John Fausset, from his loving mother, on the day
of his confirmation, June 17, 1835; Lucy Jane Fausset, with her sister
Maria’s love, April 3, 1804; Mark Fausset, in memory of little Charlie,
December 1, 1807. Such inscriptions as these touched her, with their
reminiscences of vanished affection, of hearts long mingled with the
dust.
She put the books on one side in a little pile on the carpet, as she
knelt before the open cupboard, and then she began to move the loose
litter of newspapers. The _Morning Herald_, the _Morning Chronicle_,
the _Sun_. Even _these_ were of the dead.
The cupboard held much more than she had expected. Behind the
newspapers there were two rows of pigeons-holes, twenty-six in all,
filled—choke-full, some of them—with letters, folded longwise, in a
thoroughly business-like manner.
Old letters, old histories of the family heart and mind, how much they
hold to stir the chords of love and pain! Mildred’s hand trembled as
she stretched it out to take one of those letters, idly, full of morbid
curiosity about those relics of a past life.
She never knew whether it had been deliberation or hazard which guided
her hand to the sixth pigeon-hole, but she thought afterwards that
her eye must have been caught by a bit of red ribbon—a spot of bright
colour—and that her hand followed her eye mechanically. However this
may have been, the first thing that she took from the mass of divers
correspondence in the twenty-six pigeon-holes was a packet of about
twenty letters tied with a red ribbon.
Each letter was carefully indorsed “M. F.” and a date. Some were
on foreign paper, others on thick gilt-edged note. A glance at the
uppermost letter showed her a familiar handwriting—her aunt’s, but
very different from Miss Fausset’s present precise penmanship. The
writing here was more hurried and irregular, bolder, larger, and more
indicative of impulse and emotion.
No thought of possible wrong to her aunt entered Mildred’s mind as
she untied the ribbon and seated herself in a low chair in front of
the bookcase, with the letters loose in her lap. What secrets could
there be in a girl’s letters to her elder brother which the brother’s
daughter might not read, nearly forty years after they were written?
What could there be in that yellow paper, in that faded ink, except
the pale dim ghosts of vanished fancies, and thoughts which the thinker
had long outlived?
“I wonder whether my aunt would care to read these old letters?” mused
Mildred. “It would be like calling up her own ghost. She must have
almost forgotten what she was like when she wrote them.”
The first letter was from Milan, full of enthusiasm about the Cathedral
and the Conservatoire, full of schemes for work. She was practising six
hours a day, and taking nine lessons a week—four for piano, two for
singing, three for harmony. She was in high spirits, and delighted with
her life.
“I should practise eight hours a day if Mrs. Holmby would let me,” she
wrote, “but she won’t. She says it would be too much for my health.
I believe it is only because my piano annoys her. I get up at five
on these summer mornings, and practise from six to half-past eight;
then coffee and rolls, and off to the Conservatoire; then a drive
with Mrs. Holmby, who is too lazy to walk much; and then lunch. After
lunch vespers at the Cathedral, and then two hours at the piano
before dinner. An hour and a half between dinner and tea, which we
take at nine. Sometimes one of Mrs. Holmby’s friends drops in to tea.
You needn’t be afraid: the men are all elderly, and not particularly
clean. They take snuff, and their complexions are like mahogany; but
there is one old man, with bristly gray hair standing out all over
his head like a brush, who plays the ’cello divinely, and who reminds
me of Beethoven. I am learning the ‘Sonate Pathétique,’ and I play
Bach’s preludes and fugues two hours a day. We went to La Scala the
night before last; but I was disappointed to find they were playing
a trumpery modern opera by a Milanese composer, who is all the rage
here.”
Two or three letters followed, all in the same strain, and then came
signs of discontent.
“I have no doubt Mrs. Holmby is a highly respectable person, and I
am sure you acted for the best when you chose her for my chaperon,
but she is a lump of prejudice. She objects to the Cathedral. ‘We are
fully justified in making ourselves familiar with its architectural
beauties,’ she said, in her pedantic way, ‘but to attend the services
of that benighted church is to worship in the groves of Baal.’ I told
her that I had found neither groves nor idols in that magnificent
church, and that the music I heard there was the only pleasure which
reconciled me to the utter dulness of my life at Milan—I was going
to say my life with her, but thought it better to be polite, as I am
quite in her power till you come to fetch me.
“Don’t think that I am tired of the Conservatoire, after teasing you
so to let me come here, or even that I am home-sick. I am only tired
of Mrs. Holmby; and I daresay, after all, she is no worse than any
other chaperon would be. As for the Conservatoire, I adore it, and I
feel that I am making rapid strides in my musical education. My master
is pleased with my playing of the ‘Pathétique,’ and I am to take the
‘Eroica’ next. What a privilege it is to know Beethoven! He seems to
me now like a familiar friend. I have been reading a memoir of him.
What a sad life—what a glorious legacy he leaves the world which
treated him so badly!
“I play Diabelli’s exercises for an hour and a half every morning,
before I look at any other music.”
In the next letter Mildred started at the appearance of a familiar name.
“Your kind suggestion about the Opera House has been followed,
and we have taken seats at La Scala for two nights a week. Signor
Castellani’s opera is really very charming. I have heard it now three
times, and liked it better each time. There is not much learning in
the orchestration; but there is a great deal of melody all through
the opera. The Milanese are mad about it. Signor Castellani came to
see Mrs. Holmby one evening last week, introduced by our gray-haired
’cello-player. He is a clever-looking man, about five-and-thirty, with
a rather melancholy air. He writes his librettos, and is something of
a poet.
“We have made a compromise about the Cathedral. I am to go to vespers
if I like, as my theological opinions are not in Mrs. Holmby’s
keeping. She will walk with me to the Cathedral, leave me at the
bottom of the steps, do her shopping or take a gentle walk, and return
for me when the service is over. It only lasts three-quarters of an
hour, and Mrs. Holmby always has shopping of some kind on her hands,
as she does all her own marketing, and buys everything in the smallest
quantities. I suppose by this means she makes more out of your
handsome allowance for my board—or fancies she does.”
There were more letters in the same strain, and Castellani’s name
appeared often in relation to his operas; but there was no further
mention of social intercourse. The letters grew somewhat fretful in
tone, and there were repeated complaints of Mrs. Holmby. There were
indications of fitful spirits—now enthusiasm, now depression.
“I have at least discovered that I am no genius,” she wrote. “When
I attempt to improvise, the poverty of my ideas freezes me; and yet
music with me is a passion. Those vesper services in the Cathedral are
my only consolation in this great dull town.
“No, dear Jack, I am not home-sick. I have to finish my musical
education. I am tired of nothing, except Mrs. Holmby.”
After this there was an interval. The next letter was dated six months
later. It was on a different kind of paper, and it was written from
Evian, on the Lake of Geneva. Even the character of the penmanship had
altered. It had lost its girlish dash, and something of its firmness.
The strokes were heavier, but yet bore traces of hesitation. It was
altogether a feebler style of writing.
The letter began abruptly:
“I know that you have been kind to me, John—kinder, more merciful than
many brothers would have been under the same miserable circumstances;
but nothing you can do can make me anything else than what I have
made myself—the most wretched of creatures. When I walk about in this
quiet place, alone, and see the beggars holding out their hands to me,
maimed, blind, dumb perhaps, the very refuse of humanity, I feel that
their misery is less than mine. _They_ were not brought up to think
highly of themselves, and to look down upon other people, as I was.
_They_ were never petted and admired as I was. They were not brought
up to think honour the one thing that makes life worth living—to
feel the sting of shame worse than the sting of death. They fall
into raptures if I give them a franc—and all the wealth of the world
would not give me one hour of happiness. You tell me to forget my
misery. Forget—now! No, I have no wish to leave this place. I should
be neither better nor happier anywhere else. It is very quiet here.
There are no visitors left now in the neighbourhood. There is no one
to wonder who I am, or why I am living alone here in my tiny villa.
The days go by like a long weary dream, and there are days when the
gray lake and the gray mountains are half hidden in mist, and when all
Nature seems of the same colour as my own life.
“I received the books you kindly chose for me, a large parcel. There
is a novel among them which tells almost my own story. It made me shed
tears for the first time since you left me at Lausanne. Some people
say they find a relief in tears, but my tears are not of that kind. I
was ill for nearly a week after reading that story. Please don’t send
me any more novels. If they are about happy people they irritate me;
if they are sorrowful stories they make me just a shade more wretched
than I am always. If you send me books again let them be the hardest
kind of reading you can get. I hear there is a good book on natural
history by a man called Darwin. I should like to read that.—Gratefully
and affectionately your sister,
M. F.”
This letter was dated October. The next was written in November from
the same address.
“No, my dear John, your fears were unfounded, I have not been ill. I
wish I had been—sick unto death! I have been too wretched to write,
that was all. Why should I distress you with a reiteration of my
misery—and I _cannot_ write, or think about anything else? I have no
doubt Darwin’s book is good, but I could not interest myself in it.
The thought of my own misery comes between me and every page I read.
“You ask me what I mean to do with my life when my dark days are over.
To that question there can but be one answer. I mean, so far as it
is possible, to forget. I shall go down to my grave burdened with my
dismal secret; but I shall exercise every faculty I possess to keep
that secret to the end. _He_ is not likely to betray me. The knowledge
of his own baseness will seal his lips.
“Your suggestion of a future home in some quiet village, either in
England or abroad, is kindly meant, I know, but I shudder at the mere
idea of such a life. To pass as a widow; to have to answer every
prying acquaintance—the doctor, the clergyman—people who would force
themselves upon me, however secluded my life might be; to devote
myself to a duty which in every hour of my existence would remind me
of my folly and of my degradation: I should live like the galley-slave
who drags his chain at every step.
“You tell me that the tie which would be a sorrow in the beginning
might grow into a blessing. That could never be. You know very little
of a woman’s nature when you suggest such a possibility. What _can_
your sex know of a woman’s agony under such circumstances as mine?
_You_ are never made to feel the sting of dishonour.”
A light began to dawn on Mildred as she read this second letter from
Evian. The first might mean anything—an engagement broken off, a
proud girl jilted by a worthless lover, the sense of degradation that
a woman feels in having loved unwisely—in having wasted confidence and
affection upon an unworthy object: Mildred had so interpreted that
despairing letter. But the second revealed a deeper wound, a darker
misery.
There were sentences that stood out from the context with unmistakable
meaning. “When my dark days are over”—“to pass as a widow”—“to devote
myself to a duty which would remind me of my folly and my degradation.”
That suggestion of a secluded life—of a care which should grow into a
blessing—could mean only one thing. The wretched girl who wrote that
letter was about to become a mother, under conditions which meant
life-long dishonour.
White as marble, and with hands that trembled convulsively as they held
the letter, Mildred Greswold read on, hurriedly, eagerly, breathlessly,
to the last line of the last letter. She had no scruples, no sense of
wrong-doing. The secret hidden in that little packet of letters was a
secret which she had a right to know—she above all other people, she
who had been cheated and fooled by false imaginings.
The third letter from Evian was dated late in January:
“I have been very ill—dangerously, I believe—but my doctor took
unnecessary trouble to cure me. I am now able to go out of doors
again, and I walk by the lake for half-an-hour every day in the
morning sun. The child thrives wonderfully, I am told; but if there is
to be a change of nurses, as there must be—for this woman here must
lose sight of her charge and of me when I leave this place—the change
cannot be made too soon. If Boulogne is really the best place you
can think of, your plan would be to meet me with the nurse at Dijon,
where we can take the rail. We shall post from here to that town. I am
very sorry to inflict so much trouble upon you, but it is a part of
my misery to be a burden to you as well as to myself. When once this
incubus is safely disposed of, I shall be less troublesome to you.
“No, my dear John, there is no relenting, no awakening of maternal
love. For me that must remain for ever a meaningless phrase. For me
there can be nothing now or ever more, except a sense of aversion and
horror—a shrinking from the very image of the child that must never
call me mother, or know the link between us. All that can possibly be
done to sever that link I shall do; and I entreat you, by the love of
past years, to help me in so doing. My only chance of peace in the
future is in total severance. Remember that I am prepared to make any
sacrifice that can secure the happiness of this wretched being, that
can make up to her—”
“That can make up to _her_!”
Mildred’s clutch tightened upon the letter. This was the first mention
of the infant’s sex.
“—For the dishonour to which she is born. I will gladly devote half
my fortune to her maintenance and her future establishment in life,
if she should grow up and marry. Remember also that I have sworn to
myself never to entertain any proposal of marriage, never to listen to
words of love from any man upon earth. You need have no fear of future
embarrassment on my account. I shall never give a man the right to
interrogate my past life. I resign myself to a solitary existence—but
not to a life clouded with shame. When I go back to England and resume
my place in society, I shall try to think of this last year of agony
as if it were a bad dream. You alone know my secret, and you can
help me if you will. My prayer is that from the hour I see the child
transferred to the new nurse at Dijon, I shall never look upon its
face again. The nurse can go back to her home as fast as the train
will carry her, and I can go back to London with you.”
The next letter was written seven years later, and addressed from
Kensington Gore:
“I suppose I ought to answer your long letter by saying that I am glad
the child has good health, that I rejoice in her welfare, and so on.
But I cannot be such a hypocrite. It hurts me to write about her; it
hurts me to think of her. My heart hardens itself against her at every
suggestion of her quickness, or her prettiness, or any other merit. To
me she can be nothing except—disgrace. I burnt your letter the instant
it was read. I felt as if some one was looking over my shoulder as
I read it. I dared not go down to lunch for fear Mrs. Winstanley’s
searching eyes should read my secret in my face. I pretended a
headache, and stayed in my room till our eight-o’clock dinner, when
I knew I should be safe in the dim religious light which my chaperon
affects as the most flattering to wrinkles and pearl-powder.
“But I am not ungrateful, my dear John. I am touched even by your
kindly interest in that unfortunate waif. I have no doubt you have
done wisely in placing her with the good old lady at Barnes, and that
she is very happy running about the Common. I am glad I know where
she is, so that I may never drive that way, if I can possibly help
it. Your old lady must be rather a foolish woman, I should think, to
change Fanny into Fay, on the strength of the child’s airy movements
and elfin appearance; but as long as this person knows nothing of her
charge’s history her silliness cannot matter.”
A letter of a later date was addressed from Lewes Crescent.
“I am horrified at what you have done. O, John, how could you be so
reckless, so forgetful of my reiterated entreaties to keep that
girl’s existence wide apart from mine or yours? And you have actually
introduced her into your own house as a relation; and you actually
allow her to be called by your name! Was ever such madness? You
stultify all that has been done in the past. You open the door to
questionings and conjectures of the most dreadful kind. No, I will
not see her. You must be mad to suggest such a thing. My feeling
about her to-day is exactly the same as my feeling on the day she was
born—disgust, horror, dread. I will never—willingly—look upon her face.
“Do you remember those words in _Bleak House_? ‘Your mother, Esther,
is your disgrace, and you were hers.’ So it is with that girl and me.
Can love be possible where there is this mutual disgrace?
“For God’s sake, get the girl out of your house as soon as you can!
Send her to some good school abroad—France, Germany, where you like,
and save me from the possibility of discovery. My secret has been
kept—my friends look up to me. I have outlived the worst part of my
misery, and have learnt to take some interest in life. I could not
survive the discovery of my wretched story.”
A later letter was briefer and more business-like.
“I fully concur in the settlement you propose, and would as willingly
make the sum 40,000_l._ as 30,000_l._ Remember that, so far as money
can go, I am anxious to do the _uttermost_. I hope she will marry
soon, and marry well, and that she may lead a happy and honourable
life under a new name—a name that she can bear without a blush. I
should be much relieved if she could continue to live abroad.”
This was the last letter in the bundle tied with red ribbon. In
the same pigeon-hole Mildred found the draft of a deed of gift,
transferring 30,000_l._ India Stock to Fanny Fausset, otherwise Vivien
Faux, on her twenty-first birthday, and with the draft there were
several letters from a firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
relating to the same deed of gift.
The last of the letters fell from Mildred’s lap as she sat with her
hands clasped before her face, dazed by this sudden light which altered
the aspect of her life.
“Fool, fool, fool!” she cried.
The thought of all she had suffered, and of the suffering she had
inflicted on the man she loved, almost maddened her. She had condemned
her father—her generous, noble-hearted father—upon evidence that had
seemed to her incontrovertible. She had believed in a stain upon that
honourable life—had believed him a sinner and a coward. And Miss
Fausset knew all that she had forfeited by that fatal misapprehension,
and yet kept her shameful secret, caring for her own reputation more
than for two blighted lives.
She remembered how she had appealed to her aunt to solve the mystery
of Fay’s parentage, and how deliberately Miss Fausset had declared her
ignorance. She had advised her niece to go back to her husband, but
that was all.
Mildred gathered the letters together, tied them with the faded ribbon,
and then went to her father’s writing-table and wrote these lines, in a
hand that trembled with indignation:
“I know all the enclosed letters can tell me. You have kept your
secret at the hazard of breaking two hearts. I know not if the wrong
you have done me can ever be set right; but this I know, that I shall
never again enter your house, or look upon your face, if I can help
it. I am going back to my husband, never again to leave him, if he
will let me stay.
MILDRED GRESWOLD.”
She packed the letters securely in one of the large banker’s envelopes
out of her father’s desk. She sealed the packet with her father’s
crest, intending to register and post it with her own hands on her way
to Romsey; and then, with a heart that beat with almost suffocating
force, she consulted the time-table, and tried to match trains between
Reading and Basingstoke.
There was a train from Chertsey to Reading at five. She might catch
that and be home—home—home—how the word thrilled her! some time before
midnight. She would have gone back if it had been to arrive in the dead
of night.
CHAPTER X.
MARKED BY FATE.
It was nearly ten o’clock when Mildred drove through the village of
Enderby, and saw the lights burning in the familiar cottage windows,
the post-office, and the little fancy shop where Lola had been so
constant a purchaser in the days gone by. Her eyes were full of tears
as she looked at the humble street: happy tears, for her heart thrilled
with hope as she drew near home.
“He cannot withhold his forgiveness,” she told herself. “He knows that
I acted for conscience’ sake.”
Five minutes more and she was standing in the hall, questioning
the footman, who stared at her with a bewildered air, as the most
unexpected of visitors.
“Is your master at home?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, master’s in the library. Shall I announce you?”
“No, no—I can find him. Help my maid to take my things to my room.”
“Yes, ma’am. Have you dined, or shall I tell cook to get something
ready?”
“No, no. I have dined,” she answered hurriedly, and went on to the
library, to that very room in which she had made the fatal discovery of
Fay’s identity with her husband’s first wife.
He was sitting in the lamp-light, just as he was sitting that night
when she fell fainting at his feet. The windows were open to the summer
night, books were scattered about on the table, and heaped on the floor
by his side. Whatever comfort there may be in such company, he had
surrounded himself with that comfort. He took no notice of the opening
of the door, and she was kneeling at his feet before he knew that she
was in the room.
“Mildred, what does this mean? Have we not parted often enough?”
“There was no reason for our parting—except my mistaken belief. I am
here to stay with you till my death, if you will have me, George. Be
merciful to me, my dearest! I have acted for conscience’ sake. I have
been fooled, deluded by appearances which might have deceived any one,
however wise. Forgive me, George; forgive me for the sake of all I have
suffered in doing what I thought to be my duty!”
He lifted her from her knees, took her to his heart without a word, and
kissed her. There was a silence of some moments, in which each could
hear the throbbing of the other’s heart.
“You were wrong after all, then,” he said at last; “Vivien was not your
half-sister?”
“She was not.”
“Whose child was she?”
“You must not ask me that, George. It is a secret which I ought not
to tell even to you. She was cruelly used, poor girl, more cruelly
even than I thought she had been when I believed she was my father’s
daughter. I have undeniable evidence as to her parentage. She was my
blood-relation, but she was not my sister.”
“How did you make the discovery?”
“By accident—this afternoon at The Hook. I found some papers and
letters of my father’s in a cupboard below the bookcase. I knew
nothing of their existence—should never have thought of searching for
private papers there, for I had heard my father often say that he
kept only magazines and pamphlets—things he called rubbish—in those
cupboards. I wanted to put away some things, and I stumbled on a packet
of letters which revealed the secret of Fay’s birth. I can come back to
my duty with a clear conscience. May I stay with you, George?”
“May you? Well, yes; I suppose so,” with another kiss and a tender
little laugh. “One cannot make a broken vase new again, but we may pick
up the pieces and stick them together again somehow. You have taken a
good many years out of my life, Mildred, and I doubt if you can give
them back to me. I feel twenty years older than I felt before the
beginning of this trouble; but now all is known, and you are my wife
again—well, there may be a few years of gladness for us yet. We will
make the most of them.”
* * * * *
All things dropped back into the old grooves at Enderby Manor. Mrs.
Greswold and her husband were seen together at church on the Sunday
morning after Mildred’s return, much to the astonishment of the
congregation, who immediately began to disbelieve in all their own
convictions and assertions of the past half-year, and to opine that the
lady had only been in the South for her health, more especially as it
was known that Miss Ransome had been her travelling companion.
“If she had quarrelled with her husband, she would hardly have had her
husband’s niece with her all the time,” said Mrs. Porter, the doctor’s
wife.
“But if there was no quarrel, why did he shut himself up like a hermit,
and look so wretched if one happened to meet him?” asked somebody else.
“Well, there she is, anyhow, and she looks out of health, so you may
depend some London physician ordered her abroad. They might as well
have consulted Porter, who ought to know her constitution by this time.
He’d have ordered her to Ventnor for the winter, and saved them both a
good deal of trouble; but there, people never think they can be cured
without going to Cavendish Square.”
Mildred’s strength seemed to fail her more in the happiness of that
unhoped-for reunion than it had ever done during her banishment.
She wanted to do so much at Enderby: to visit about among her
shabby-genteel old ladies and her cottagers as in the cloudless time
before Lola’s death; to superintend her garden; to visit old friends
whose faces were endeared by fond association with the past; to be
everywhere with her husband: walking with him in the copses, riding
about the farms, and on the edge of the forest, in the dewy summer
mornings. She wanted to do all these things, and she found that her
strength would not let her.
“I hope that my health is not going to give way, just when I am so
happy,” she said to her husband one day, when she felt almost fainting
after their morning ride.
He took alarm instantly, and sent off for Mr. Porter, though Mildred
made light of her feelings next moment. The family practitioner sounded
her with the usual professional gravity, but his face grew more serious
as he listened to the beating of her heart. He affected, however, to
think very little of her ailments, talked of nerves, and suggested
bromide of something, as if it were infallible; but when George
Greswold went out into the hall with him he owned that all was not
right.
“The heart is weak,” he said. “I hope there may be no organic mischief,
but—”
“You mean that I shall lose her,” interrupted Greswold, in a husky
whisper.
His own heart was beating like the tolling of a church bell—beating
with the dull, heavy stroke of despair.
“No, no. I don’t think there’s any immediate danger, but I should like
you to take higher advice—Clark or Jenner, perhaps.”
“Of course. I will send for some one at once.”
“The very thing to alarm her. She ought to be kept free from all
possible anxiety or excitement. Don’t let her ride—except in the
quietest way—or walk far enough to fatigue herself. You might take her
up to town for a few days on the pretence of seeing picture-galleries
or something, and then coax her to consult a physician, just for _your_
satisfaction. Make as light as you can of her complaint.”
“Yes, yes. I understand. O, God, that it should be so, after all; when
I thought I had come to the end of sorrow!” This in an undertone. “For
pity’s sake, Porter, tell me the worst! You think it a bad case?”
Porter shook his head, tried to speak, grasped George Greswold’s hand,
and made for the door. Mr. and Mrs. Greswold had been his patients and
friends for the last fifteen years, and in his rough way he was devoted
to them.
“See Jenner as soon as you can,” he said. “It is a very delicate case.
I would rather not hazard an opinion.”
George Greswold went out to the lawn where he had sat on the Sunday
evening before Lola’s death. It had been summer then, and it was summer
now—the time of roses, before the song of the nightingale had ceased
amidst the seclusion of twilit branches. He sat down upon the bench
under the cedar, and gave himself up to his despair. He had tasted
again the sweet cup of domestic peace—he had been gladdened again by
the only companionship that had ever filled his heart, and now in the
near future he saw the prospect of another parting, and this time
without hope on earth. Once again he told himself that he was marked
out by Fate.
“I suppose it must always be so,” he thought; “in the lots that fall
from the urn there must be some that are all of one colour—black—black
as night.”
Mildred came out to the lawn with him, followed by Kassandra, who had
deserted the master for the mistress since her return, as if in a
delight mixed with fear lest she should again depart.
“What has become of you, George? I thought you were coming back to the
morning-room directly, and it is nearly an hour since Mr. Porter went
away.”
“I came into the garden—to—to see your new shrubbery.”
“Did you really? how good of you! It is hardly to be called a new
shrubbery—only a little addition to the old one. It will give an idea
of distance when the shrubs are good enough to grow tall and thick.
Will you come with me and tell me what you think of it?”
“Gladly, dear, if it will not tire you.”
“Tire me to walk to the shrubbery! No, I am not quite so bad as that,
though I find I am a bad walker compared with what I used to be. I
daresay I am out of training. I could walk any distance at Brighton
last autumn. A long walk on the road to Rottingdean was my only
distraction; but at Pallanza I began to flag, and the hotel people were
always suggesting drives, so I got out of the habit of walking.”
He had his hand through her arm, and drew her near him as they
sauntered across the lawn, with a hopeless wonder at the thought that
she was here at his side, close to his heart, all in all to him to-day,
and that the time might soon come when she would have melted out of
his life as that fair daughter had done, when the grave under the tree
should mean a double desolation, an everlasting despair.
“Is there _any_ world where we shall be together again?” he asked
himself. “What is immortality worth to me if it does not mean reunion?
To go round upon the endless wheel of eternity, to be fixed into the
universal life, to be a part of the Creator Himself! Nothing in a life
to come can be gain to me if it do not give me back what I have lost.”
They dawdled about the shrubbery, man and wife, arm linked with arm,
looking at the new plantings one by one; she speculating how many years
each tree would take to come to perfection.
“They will make a very good effect in three or four years, George.
Don’t you think so? That _Picea nobilis_ will fill the open space
yonder. We have allowed ten feet clear on every side. The golden brooms
grow only too quickly. How serious you look! Are you thinking of
anything that makes you anxious?”
“I am thinking of Pamela and her sweetheart. I should like to make Lady
Lochinvar’s acquaintance before the marriage.”
“Shall I ask her here?”
“She could hardly come, I fancy, while the wedding is on the _tapis_.
I propose that you and I should go up to London to-morrow, put up at
our old hotel—we shall be more independent there than at Grosvenor
Gardens—and spend a few days quietly, seeing a good deal of the
picture-galleries, and a little of our new connections—and of Rosalind
and her husband, whom we don’t often see. Would you like to do that,
Mildred?”
“I like anything you like. I delight in seeing pictures with you, and
I shall be glad to see Rosalind; and if Pamela really wishes us to
be present at her wedding, I think we ought to be there, don’t you,
George?”
“If you would like it dearest; if—”
He left the sentence unfinished, fearing to betray his apprehension.
Till he had consulted the highest authorities in the land he felt that
he could know but little of that hidden malady which paled her cheek
and gave heaviness to the pathetic eyes.
* * * * *
They were in Cavendish Square, husband and wife, on the morning after
their arrival in town, by special appointment with the physician.
Mildred submitted meekly to a careful consultation—only for his own
satisfaction, her husband told her, making light of his anxiety.
“I want you to be governed by the best possible advice, dearest, in the
care of your health.”
“You don’t think there is danger, George; that I am to be taken away
from you, just when all our secrets and sorrows are over?”
“Indeed, no, dearest! God grant you may be spared to me for many happy
years to come!”
“There is no reason, I think, that it should not be so. Mr. Porter said
my complaint was chiefly nervous. He would not wonder at my nerves
being in a poor way if he knew how I suffered in those bitter days of
banishment.”
The examination was long and serious, yet conducted by the physician
with such gentle _bonhomie_ as not to alarm the patient. When it was
over, he dismissed her with a kindly smile, after advice given upon
very broad lines.
“After the question of diet, which I have written for you here,” he
said, handing her half a sheet of paper, “the only other treatment I
can counsel is self-indulgence. Never walk far enough to feel tired, or
fast enough to be out of breath. Live as much as possible in the open
air, but let your life out of doors be the sweet idleness of the sunny
South, rather than our ideal bustling, hurrying British existence.
Court repose—tranquillity for body and mind in all things.”
“You mean that I am to be an invalid for the rest of my life, as my
poor mother was for five years before her death?”
“At what age did your mother die?”
“Thirty-four. For a long time the doctors would hardly say what was the
matter with her. She suffered terribly from palpitation of the heart,
as I have done for the last six months; but the doctors made light of
it, and told my father there was very little amiss. Towards the end
they changed their opinion, and owned that there was organic disease.
Nothing they could do for her seemed of much use.”
Mildred went back to the waiting-room while her husband had an
interview with the doctor; an interview which left him but the faintest
hope—only the hope of prolonging a fading life.
“She may last for years, perhaps,” said the physician, pitying the
husband’s silent agony, “but it would be idle to disguise her state.
She will never be strong again. She must not ride, or drive, or occupy
herself in any way that can involve violent exertion, or a shock to the
nerves. Cherish her as a hothouse flower, and she may be with you for
some time yet.”
“God bless you, even for that hope,” said Greswold, and then he spoke
of his niece’s wedding, and the wish for Mildred’s presence.
“No harm in a wedding, I think, if you are careful of her: no
over-exertion, no agitating scenes. The wedding may cheer her, and
prevent her brooding on her own state. Good-day. I shall be glad to
know the effect of my prescription, and to see Mrs. Greswold again in a
month or two, if she is strong enough to come to London. If you want me
at any time in the country—”
“You will come, will you not? Remember she is all that is precious to
me upon this earth. If I lose her I lose everything.”
“Send for me at any time. If it is possible for me to go to you I will
go.”
CHAPTER XI.
LIKE A TALE THAT IS TOLD.
Pamela’s wedding was one of the most successful functions of the London
season; and the society papers described the ceremony with a fulness
of detail which satisfied even the bride’s avidity for social fame.
Mr. Smithson sent her gown just an hour before it had to make its
reverence before the altar in the Abbey; and Pamela, who had been in an
almost hysterical agony for an hour-and-a-half, lest she should have
no gown in which to be married, owned, as she pirouetted before the
chevalglass, that the fit was worth the suspense.
The ladies who write fashion articles in the two social arbiters
were rapturous about Mr. Smithson’s _chef-d’œuvre_, and gave glowing
accounts of certain trousseau gowns which they had been privileged
to review at an afternoon tea in Grosvenor Gardens a week before the
event. Pamela’s delight in these paragraphs was intensified by the
idea that César Castellani would read them, though it is hardly likely
that listless skimmer of modern literature went so deep as fashion
articles.
“He will see at least that if he had married me he would not have
married quite a nobody,” said Pamela, in a summer reverie upon the blue
water in front of The Hook, where she and her husband dawdled about in
a punt nearly all day, expatiating upon each other’s merits. And so
floats this light bark gaily into a safe and placid haven, out of reach
of privateer or pirate such as the incomparable Castellani.
* * * * *
It was not until after Pamela’s wedding, and nearly a month after
Mildred’s discovery of the letters in the bookcase, that Miss Fausset
made any sign; but one August morning her reply came in the shape of a
letter, entreating Mildred to go to her, as an act of charity to one
whose sands had nearly run out.
“I will not sue to you _in formâ pauperis_,” she wrote, “so I do not
pretend that I am a dying woman; but I believe I have not very long
to live, and before my voice is mute upon earth I want to tell you
the history of one year of my girlhood. I want you to know that I am
not altogether the kind of sinner you may think me. I will not write
that history, and if you refuse to come to me, I must die and leave it
untold, and in that case my death-bed will be miserable.”
Mildred’s gentle heart could not harden itself against such an appeal
as this. She told her husband only that her aunt was very ill and
ardently desired to see her; and after some discussion it was arranged
that she should travel quietly to Brighton, he going with her. He
suggested that they should stop in Miss Fausset’s house for a night or
two, but Mildred told him she would much prefer to stay at an hotel; so
it was decided that they should put up at the quiet hotel on the East
Cliff, where Mr. Greswold had taken Pamela nearly a year before.
Mildred’s health had improved under the physician’s _régime_; and her
husband felt hopeful as they travelled together through the summer
landscape, by that line which she had travelled in her desolation—the
level landscape with glimpses of blue sea and stretches of gray beach
or yellow sand, bright in the August noontide.
George Greswold had respected Mildred’s reserve, and had never urged
her to enlighten him as to the secret of his first wife’s parentage;
but he had his ideas upon the subject, and, remembering his interview
with the solicitor and that gentleman’s perturbation at the name of
Fausset, he was inclined to think that the pious lady of Lewes Crescent
might not be unconcerned in the mystery. And now this summons to
Brighton seemed to confirm his suspicions.
He went no further than Miss Fausset’s threshold, and allowed his wife
to go to her aunt alone.
“I shall walk up and down and wait till you come out again,” he said,
“so I hope that you won’t stay too long.”
He was anxious to limit an interview which might involve agitation for
Mildred. He parted from her almost reluctantly at the doorway of the
gloomy house, with its entrance-hall of the pattern of forty years
ago, furnished with barometer, umbrella-stand, and tall chairs, all
in Spanish mahogany, and with never a picture or a bust, bronze or
porcelain, to give light and colour to the scene.
Miss Fausset had changed for the worse even in the brief interval since
Mildred had last seen her. She was sitting in the back drawing-room as
usual, but her table and chair had been wheeled into the bay-window,
which commanded a garden with a single tree and a variety of house-tops
and dead walls.
“So you have come,” she said, without any form of greeting. “I hardly
expected so much from you. Sit down there, if you please. I have a good
deal to tell you.”
“I had intended never to enter your house again, aunt. But I could not
refuse to hear anything you have to say in your own justification. Only
there is one act of yours which you can never justify—either to me or
to God.”
“What is that, pray?”
“Your refusal to tell me the secret of Fay’s birth, when my happiness
and my husband’s depended upon my knowing it.”
“To tell you that would have been to betray my own secret. Do you
think, after keeping it for nine-and-thirty years, I was likely to
surrender it lightly? I would sooner have cut my tongue out. I did what
I could for you. I told you to ignore idle prejudice and to go back to
your husband. I told you what was due from you to him, over and above
all sanctimonious scruples. You would not listen to me, and whatever
misery you have suffered has been misery of your own creation.”
“Do not let us talk any more about it, aunt. I can never think
differently about the wrong you have done me. Had I not found those
letters—by the merest accident, remember—I might have gone down to my
grave a desolate woman. I might have died in a foreign land, far away
from the only voice that could comfort me in my last hours. No; my
opinion of your guilty silence can never change. You were willing to
break two hearts rather than hazard your own reputation; and yet you
must have known that I would keep your secret, that I should sympathise
with the sorrow of your girlhood,” added Mildred, in softened tones.
Miss Fausset was slow in replying. Mildred’s reproaches fell almost
unheeded upon her ear. It was of herself she was thinking, with all
the egotism engendered by a lonely old age, without ties of kindred or
friendship, with no society but that of flatterers and parasites.
“I asked you if you had found any letters of your father’s relating to
that unhappy girl,” she said. “I always feared his habit of keeping
letters—a habit he learnt from my father. Yet I hoped that he would
have burnt mine, knowing, as he did, that the one desire of my life was
to obliterate that hideous past. Vain hope. I was like the ostrich.
If I hid my secret in England, it was known in Italy. The man who
destroyed my life was a traitor to the core of his heart, and he
betrayed me to his son. He told César how he had fascinated a rich
English girl, and fooled her with a mock marriage; and fifteen years
ago the young man presented himself to me with the full knowledge of
that dark blot upon my life—to me, here, where I had held my head
so high. He let me know the full extent of his knowledge in his own
subtle fashion; but he always treated me with profound respect—he
pretended to be fond of me; and, God help me, there was a charm for
me in the very sound of his voice. The man who cheated me out of my
life’s happiness was lying in his grave: death lessens the bitterness
of hatred, and I could not forget that I had once loved him.”
The tears gathered slowly in the cold gray eyes, and rolled slowly down
the hollow cheeks.
“Yes, I loved him, Mildred—loved him with a foolish, inexperienced
girl’s romantic love. I asked no questions. I believed all he told
me. I flung myself blindfold into the net. His genius, his grace,
his fire—ah, you can never imagine the charm of _his_ manner, the
variety of his talent, compared with which his son’s accomplishments
are paltry. You see me now a hard, elderly woman. As a girl I was
warm-hearted and impetuous, full of enthusiasm and imagination, while
I loved and believed in my lover. My whole nature changed after that
great wrong—my heart was frozen.”
There was a silence of some moments, and then Miss Fausset continued
in short agitated sentences, her fingers fidgeting nervously with the
double eyeglass which she wore on a slender gold chain:
“It was his genius I worshipped. He was at the height of his success.
The Milanese raved about him as a rival to Donizetti; his operas
were the rage. Can you wonder that I, a girl passionately fond of
music, was carried away by the excitement which was in the very air
I breathed? I went to the opera night after night. I heard that
fascinating music till its melodies seemed interwoven with my being. I
suppose I was weak enough to let the composer see how much I admired
him. He had quarrelled with his wife; and the quarrel—caused by his
own misconduct—had resulted in a separation which was supposed to be
permanent. There may have been people in Milan who knew that he was a
married man, but my chaperon did not; and he was careful to suppress
the fact from the beginning of our acquaintance.
“Yes, no doubt he found out that I was madly in love with him. He
pretended to be interested in my musical studies. He advised and taught
me. He played the violin divinely, and we used to play _concertante_
duets during the long evenings, while my chaperon dozed by the fire,
caring very little how I amused myself, so long as I did not interfere
with her comfort. She was a sensual, selfish creature, given over to
self-indulgence, and she let me have my own way in everything. He
used to join me at the Cathedral at vespers. How my heart thrilled
when I found him there, sitting in the shadowy chancel in the gray
November light! for I knew it was for my sake he went there, not from
any religious feeling. Our hands used to meet and clasp each other
almost unconsciously when the music moved us as it went soaring up to
the gorgeous roof, in the dim light of the hanging lamps before the
altar. I have found myself kneeling with my hand in his when I came out
of a dream of Paradise to which that exquisite music had lifted me.
Yes, I loved him, Mildred; I loved him as well as ever you loved your
husband—as passionately and unselfishly as woman ever loved. I rejoiced
in the thought that I was rich, for his sake. I planned the life that
we were to live together; a life in which I was to be subordinate to
him in all things—his adoring slave. I suppose most girls have some
such dream. God help them, when it ends as mine did!”
Again there was a silence—a chilling muteness upon Mildred’s part. How
could she be sorry for this woman who had never been sorry for others;
who had let her child travel from the cradle to the grave without one
ray of maternal love to light her dismal journey! She remembered Fay’s
desolate life and blighted nature—Fay, who had a heart large enough
for a great unselfish love. She remembered her aunt’s impenetrable
silence when a word would have restored happiness to a ruined home;
she remembered, and her heart was hardened against this proud, selfish
woman, whose life had been one long sacrifice to the world’s opinion.
“I loved him, Mildred, and I trusted him as I would have trusted any
man who had the right to call himself a gentleman,” pursued Miss
Fausset, eager to justify herself in the face of that implacable
silence. “I had been brought up, after the fashion of those days, in
a state of primeval innocence. I had never, even in fiction, been
allowed to come face to face with the cruel realities of life. I
was educated in an age which thought _Jane Eyre_ an improper novel,
and which restricted a young woman’s education to music and modern
languages; the latter taught so badly, for the most part, as to be
useless when she travelled. My knowledge of Italian would just enable
me to translate a libretto when I had it before me in print, or to ask
my way in the streets; but it was hardly enough to make me understand
the answer. It never entered into my mind to doubt Paolo Castellani
when he told me that, although we could not, as Papist and Protestant,
be married in any church in Milan, we could be united by a civil
marriage before a Milanese authority, and that such a marriage would
be binding all the world over. Had I been a poor girl I might of my
own instinct have suspected treachery; but I was rich and he was poor,
and he would be a gainer by our marriage. Servants and governesses had
impressed me with the sense of my own importance, and I knew that I
was what is called a good match. So I fell into the trap, Mildred, as
foolishly as a snared bird. I crept out of the house one morning after
my music-lesson, found my lover waiting for me with a carriage close
by, went with him to a dingy office in a dingy street, but which had a
sufficiently official air to satisfy my ignorance, and went through a
certain formula, hearing something read over by an elderly man of grave
appearance, and signing my name to a document after Paolo had signed
his.
“It was all a sham and a cheat, Mildred. The old man was a Milanese
attorney, with no more power to marry us than he had to make us
immortal. The paper was a deed-of-gift by which Paolo Castellani
transferred some imaginary property to me. The whole thing was a farce;
but it was so cleverly planned that the cheat was effected without
the aid of an accomplice. The old man acted in all good faith, and
my blind confidence and ignorance of Italian accepted a common legal
formality as a marriage. I went from that dark little office into the
spring sunshine happy as ever bride went out of church, kissed and
complimented by a throng of approving friends. I cared very little
as to what my brother might think of this clandestine marriage. He
would have refused his consent beforehand, no doubt, but he would
reconcile himself to the inevitable by and by. In any event, I should
be independent of his control. My fortune would be at my own disposal
after my one-and-twentieth birthday—mine, to throw into my husband’s
lap.
“That is nearly the end of my story, Mildred. We went from Milan to
Como, and after a few days at Bellagio crossed the St. Gothard, and
sauntered from one lovely scene to another till we stopped at Vevay.
For just six weeks I lived in a fool’s paradise; but by that time my
brother had traced us to Vevay—having learnt all that could be learnt
about Castellani at Milan before he started in pursuit of us. He came,
and my dream ended. I knew that I was a dishonoured woman, and that
all my education, my innate pride in myself, and my fortune had done
for me, was to place me as low as the lowest creature in the land. I
left Vevay within an hour of that revelation a broken-hearted woman.
I never saw my destroyer’s face again. You know all, Mildred, now.
Can you wonder that I shrank with abhorrence from the offspring of my
disgrace—that I refused ever to see her after I had once released
myself from the hateful tie?”
“Yes, I do wonder; I must always wonder that you were merciless to
her—that you had no pity for that innocent life.”
“Ah, you are your father’s daughter. He wished me to hide myself in
some remote village so that I might taste the sweets of maternal
affection, enjoy the blessed privilege of rearing a child who at every
instant of her life would remind me of the miserable infatuation that
had blighted my own. No, Mildred, I was not made for such an existence
as that. I have tried to do good to others; I have laboured for God’s
Church and God’s poor. That has been my atonement.”
“It would have been a better atonement to have cared for your own flesh
and blood; but with your means and opportunities you might have done
both. I loved Fay, remember, aunt. I cannot forget how bright and happy
she might have been. I cannot forget the wrongs that warped her nature.”
“You are very hard, Mildred, hard to a woman whose days are numbered.”
“Are not my days numbered, aunt?” cried Mildred, with a sudden burst
of passion. “Was not my heart broken when I left this house last year
to go into loneliness and exile, abandoning a husband I adored? That
parting was my deathblow. In all the long dreary days that have gone by
since then my hold upon life has been loosening. You might have saved
me that agony. You might have sent me back to my home rejoicing—and you
would not. You cared more for your own pride than for my happiness. You
might have made your daughter’s life happy—and you would not. You cared
more for the world’s esteem than for her welfare. As you sacrificed
her, your daughter, you have sacrificed me, your niece. I know that I
am doomed. Just when God has given me back the love that makes life
precious, I feel the hand of death upon me, and know that the hour of
parting is near.”
“I have been a sinner, Mildred; but I have suffered—I have suffered.
You ought not to judge me. You have never known shame.”
That last appeal softened Mildred’s heart. She went over to her aunt’s
chair, and leant over her and kissed her.
“Let the past be forgotten,” she said, “and let us part in love.”
And so, a quarter of an hour later, they parted, never to meet again on
earth.
Miss Fausset died in the early winter, cut off by the first frost,
like a delicate flower. She had made no change in the disposal of her
property, and her death made Mildred Greswold a very rich woman.
“My aunt loved the poor,” said Mildred, when she and her husband spoke
of this increase of wealth. “We are both so much richer than our needs,
George. We have lived in sunshine for the most part. When I am gone I
should like you to do some great thing for those who live in shadow.”
“My beloved, I shall remain upon this earth only to obey your will.”
He lived just long enough to keep his promise. The Greswold Hospital
remains, a monument of thoughtful beneficence, in one of the most
wretched neighbourhoods south of the Thames; but George Greswold and
his race are ended like a tale that is told.
* * * * *
César Castellani, enriched by a legacy from Miss Fausset, contrives
still to flourish, and still to wear a gardenia in the button-hole of
an artistic coat; but fashions change quickly in the realm of light
literature, and the star of the author of _Nepenthe_ is sunk in the
oblivion that engulfs ephemeral reputations. Castellani is still
received in certain drawing-rooms; but it is in the silly circles alone
that he is believed in as a man who has only missed greatness because
he is too much of an artist to be a steadfast worker.
THE END.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
CHEAP UNIFORM EDITION
OF
MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS.
At all Booksellers’, price 2s., picture covers; 2s. 6d., cloth gilt,
uniform with the Cheap Edition of Miss BRADDON’S other Novels,
LIKE AND UNLIKE
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“Lady Audley’s Secret,” “Mohawks,” &c.
_OPINIONS OF THE PRESS._
“Everybody who cares about a novel with a good plot so well worked
out that the excitement is kept up through the three volumes, and
culminates with the last chapter of the story, must ‘Like’ and can
never again ‘Unlike’ this the latest and certainly one of the best of
Miss Braddon’s novels. Miss Braddon is our most dramatic novelist. Her
method is to interest the reader at once with the very first line, just
as that Master-Dramatist of our time Dion Boucicault would rivet the
attention of an audience by the action at the opening of the piece,
even before a line of the dialogue had been spoken. This authoress
never wastes her own time and that of her reader by giving up any
number of pages at the outset to a minute description of scenery, to a
history of a certain family, to a wearisome account of the habits and
customs of the natives, or to explaining peculiarities in manners and
dialect which are to form one of the principal charms of the story.
No: Miss Braddon is dramatic just as far as the drama can assist
her, and then she is the genuine novelist. A few touches present her
characters living before the reader, and the story easily develops
itself in, apparently, the most natural manner possible. ‘Like and
Unlike’ will make many people late for dinner, and will keep a number
of persons up at night when they ought to be soundly sleeping. These
are two sure tests of a really well-told sensational novel. _Vive_ Miss
Braddon!”—_Punch_, October 15th, 1887.
“The author of ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ still keeps her place among the
most thrilling and fascinating writers of sensational fiction. Her new
novel, ‘Like and Unlike,’ has the best qualities of her best work.
The style is as clear and nervous as ever, the plot constructed and
developed with the same admirable skill, the interest as intense, and
the effect on the imagination as powerful. There is at the same time
more evident in this than in some former works of Miss Braddon’s a
higher purpose than merely to amuse and thrill the reader. The dramatic
element is strong in this tale, but it is the story that speaks; the
author never for a moment stops in her narrative to offer a word of
comment or enforce its moral. None the less powerfully does it preach
the vanity of vanities of the selfish pursuit of pleasure, the misery
that is the end of heartlessness, the retribution that follows sins
great and small, and also the omnipotence in noble natures of penitence
and love. It would not be fair to the reader to take away from that
ignorance of the future which is necessary to the keenest enjoyment of
Miss Braddon’s stories. ‘Like and Unlike’ deals with both country and
town life. There are pure and noble characters in it, and others light
and vain and vicious, and the currents of life of the two classes are
intermingled beneficently and tragically. The title has reference to
the twin brothers, who play a leading—one of them the leading—part in
the drama. Their characters are admirably ‘delineated and contrasted,’
and the moral significance of Valentine’s career is as great as its
interest is absorbing. Madge is also a powerful creation. The Deverill
girls and the other society characters are vividly portrayed. The story
begins quietly, and for a time the reader believes that Miss Braddon
is for once not going to be sensational. He finds by and by that this
is a mistake, and is intensely interested by the gradual, natural, and
apparently inevitable way in which, out of very ordinary materials, the
structure of a powerful plot rises. This will rank among the best of
Miss Braddon’s novels.”—_Scotsman_, October 3, 1887.
_When announcing a recent Novel (“Phantom Fortune”), Messrs. Tillotson
& Son published the following statement in their great coterie of
newspapers_:
“In announcing the issue of another story from the pen of this gifted
author, it seems scarcely necessary to write anything like an elaborate
notice of her previous successes on the field of light literature. It
is now many years ago since ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ brought Miss Braddon
the fame which lasts all time; and numerous as have been the stories
produced by her facile pen since then, her genius has lost none of
its brilliance nor her skill its cunning. Years have not weakened her
marvellous powers of imagination, nor familiarity with her productions
diminished the sparkling freshness of her infinite variety. Her later
works, as competent critics readily aver, exhibit higher and better
qualities than her earlier, because bringing to bear long experience, a
ripened understanding, and a mature judgment upon her brilliant genius,
her unrivalled skill in the construction of plots, and her marvellous
talent for depicting human nature under incessant changes of character
and circumstances.
“A glance at the earlier chapters of the story upon which Miss Braddon
is now engaged (‘Phantom Fortune’), and which we shall shortly place
before our readers, abundantly justifies language of the loftiest
eulogy. Almost at its very opening we are introduced to characters and
scenes of absorbing interest. Around distinguished personages in the
political and diplomatic world gather lords and ladies of the highest
rank of beauty and fashion. Indian affairs and Indian princes figure
conspicuously. The Cabinet at home and the India Office are in a
flutter of excitement consequent upon extraordinary rumours affecting
an Anglo-Indian official of high rank, who suddenly returns to England,
another Warren Hastings, to defend himself before the Imperial
Parliament, but mysteriously dies on his arrival in this country, after
painful interviews with his accomplished wife, a person of exalted rank
and station. With a skill all Miss Braddon’s own, she portrays not the
outer and conventional ways of Society only, but also the inner life of
the lords and ladies who constitute the leading characters, drawn by
her masterly hand. As the story proceeds it may be expected to develop
one of the strongest of Miss Braddon’s strong plots, and to maintain
her almost boundless sway in the domain of fiction.”
_FURTHER OPINIONS OF THE PRESS._
_From amongst reviews of Miss Braddon’s recent works, which would
occupy a large volume if published in extenso, we select the following
pithy extracts_:
JUST AS I AM.
“Miss Braddon’s novel, ‘Just as I am,’ is as fresh, as wholesome,
as enthralling, as amusing as any of the stories with which, for a
series of years, she has proved her title as Queen of the Circulating
Library.”—_The World._
“Equals in skilful design and powerful execution any of Miss Braddon’s
previous works.”—_Daily Telegraph._
“The story may be added to her lengthy list of successes.”—_Court
Journal._
“From the pen of the most accomplished author of the day, a lady who
is perhaps the most facile and voluminous writer of fiction.”—_Court
Circular._
ASPHODEL.
“The most charming novel that Miss Braddon has ever produced.”—_Vanity
Fair._
“Deeply interesting and extremely well written.”—_Morning Post._
“A sound and healthy story; in one word, a true woman’s book.”—_Morning
Advertiser._
“The style is wonderfully easy and fluent; the conversations are
brilliant, pointed, and vigorous. The early scenes are charming.”—_The
Athenæum._
“Full of genuine human interest.”—_The Scotsman._
MOUNT ROYAL.
“The worthy work of a thorough artist.”—_Morning Post._
“Replete with all the freshness and charm which she has taught the
public to expect from her.”—_Daily Telegraph._
“Miss Braddon’s romantic spirit has been in no way quenched, but in
this last novel its brighter rays are tempered by experience.”—_Daily
Chronicle._
“Miss Braddon has given us a story which, while it adds to her fame as
an authoress, increases our indebtedness to her; the healthy tone of
‘Mount Royal’ is not one of its least charms.”—_Pictorial World._
“The story can be followed with the keenest interest.”—_St. James’s
Gazette._
“Contains many sparkling passages and many happy thoughts.”—_Sheffield
Daily Telegraph._
“The novel is without doubt a good and a bright one.”—_Manchester
Courier._
TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
“Contains more elements of success than a dozen ordinary
novels.”—_Bradford Observer._
“The latest addition to Miss Braddon’s unparalleled series of brilliant
novels.”—_Court Journal._
“Sustains the fame which Miss Braddon has achieved as one of the first
of living novelists.”—_Newcastle Daily Chronicle._
“Her work, take it for all in all, is the best we get.”—_Sunday Times._
A STRANGE WORLD.
“Has a fresh and fascinating interest.”—_Daily Telegraph._
“Brimful of life and movement, and that life and movement of a
thoroughly healthy kind.”—_World._
“In the construction of a plot Miss Braddon is unrivalled.”—_Court
Journal._
DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
“Bright writing, and a story which never flags.”—_Scotsman._
“A work of good moral purpose and of skilful execution.”—_Pictorial
World._
“Full of life and interest, vivid in characterisation, abounds in
pleasant and accurate description.”—_Sunday Times._
WEAVERS AND WEFT.
“It is eminently attractive reading.”—_Whitehall Review._
“An undeniable amount of entertaining reading in the book.”—_Athenæum._
“Like a gleam of sunshine in dreary weather.”—_News of the World._
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO.
CHEAP EDITION OF
MISS BRADDON’S NOVELS.
In Two-Shilling Volumes, Uniform.
ALWAYS IN PRINT.
_Also in cloth, 2s. 6d.; and in vellum, 3s. 6d._
1. LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET.
2. HENRY DUNBAR.
3. ELEANOR’S VICTORY.
4. AURORA FLOYD.
5. JOHN MARCHMONT’S LEGACY.
6. THE DOCTOR’S WIFE.
7. ONLY A CLOD.
8. SIR JASPER’S TENANT.
9. TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.
10. LADY’S MILE.
11. LADY LISLE.
12. CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE.
13. BIRDS OF PREY.
14. CHARLOTTE’S INHERITANCE.
15. RUPERT GODWIN.
16. RUN TO EARTH.
17. DEAD SEA FRUIT.
18. RALPH THE BAILIFF.
19. FENTON’S QUEST.
20. LOVELS OF ARDEN.
21. ROBERT AINSLEIGH.
22. TO THE BITTER END.
23. MILLY DARRELL.
24. STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS.
25. LUCIUS DAVOREN.
26. TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
27. LOST FOR LOVE.
28. A STRANGE WORLD.
29. HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE.
30. DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
31. JOSHUA HAGGARD.
32. WEAVERS AND WEFT.
33. AN OPEN VERDICT.
34. VIXEN.
35. THE CLOVEN FOOT.
36. THE STORY OF BARBARA.
37. JUST AS I AM.
38. ASPHODEL.
39. MOUNT ROYAL.
40. GOLDEN CALF.
41. PHANTOM FORTUNE.
42. FLOWER AND WEED.
43. ISHMAEL.
44. WYLLARD’S WEIRD.
45. UNDER THE RED FLAG.
46. ONE THING NEEDFUL.
47. MOHAWKS.
* * * * *
48. CUT BY THE COUNTY.
_Price One Shilling._
“No one can be dull who has a novel by Miss Braddon in hand. The
most tiresome journey is beguiled, and the most wearisome illness is
brightened, by any one of her books.”
_Extract from a very eloquent and excellent Sermon preached by the
Rev. W. Benham, B.D., on March 4th, 1883, at St. Stephen’s Church,
South Kensington._
“I have undertaken to speak freely concerning our social life and
habits, and therefore I shall not shrink from speaking about two
subjects not often mentioned within the walls of a church—I mean
‘sensational novels,’ as they are called, and the drama. great outcry
is made against the former, which I am afraid is not very sincere,
considering that those who make the outcry go on reading them. That
the writers depict startling and sometimes horrible scenes no one will
deny, but I am not aware that there is any more harm in that than in
reading the last report of the ‘Dublin Police News.’ What lies at the
foundation of such novels is the craving after reality as against false
sentiment. Who is the worse for reading ‘Hamlet,’ or ‘Othello,’ or
‘Macbeth’? There are horrors enough in these. What young man should
not be the better for admiring Ophelia or Desdemona? I know an aged
living prelate, whose praise is widely spread in the Church for his
contributions to sacred literature, and who is venerated by all who
love him for his piety and saintliness, who declares that the writings
of the chief of these novelists—I mean Miss Braddon—are among the best
of the works of fiction. Judge for yourselves. I hold that her books
are _the very contrast_ of the few French sensation novels that I have
read, whose philosophy might be summed up in the scoffer’s words, ‘Let
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’”
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 113 Changed: my benfactress has consummated the generosity
to: my benefactress has consummated the generosity
pg 218 Changed: He was sittting in the lamp-light
to: He was sitting in the lamp-light
pg 226 Changed: Tire me to walk to the shubbery
to: Tire me to walk to the shrubbery
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FATAL THREE, VOL. III ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
